By Clare Phillips
This is the rescheduled lecture originally planned for March but which was cancelled due to the adverse weather conditions.
This lecture will look at a wide and glittering array of jewelled objets and jewellery created by the Russian imperial goldsmith Carl Fabergé. Famed for his ingenious precious eggs made for the Tzarinas from the mid 1880s to 1917, his reputation also rested on his superb enamelled boxes and picture frames, carved hardstone animal and flower studies, small trinkets and jewellery. We shall trace his rise at the extravagant but doomed Russian Court, follow his international triumph and eventual exile, all the while focussing on individual pieces and the diverse materials and techniques by which they were created.
Clare Phillips – MA in The History of Design from the Royal College of Art, 1989. Clare is a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum specialising in the history of jewellery. The V & A’s display of Faberge, including recent gifts from the Kenneth and Sallie Snowman Collection, has a dedicated case in the Jewellery Gallery, and the Museum has hosted two major Faberge exhibitions. Clare was involved with the more recent of these in 1994.
Author of:
Jewellery from Antiquity to the Present (Thames & Hudson 1996)
Jewels and Jewellery (V & A 2000)
Curator of:
Bejewelled by Tiffany (Gilbert Collection, 2006)