Пётр Карл Фаберже — jeweller / goldsmith с корнями из Russian Empire
Peter Carl Fabergé was born in Saint Petersburg in May 1846. His family were Huguenots who had left France after the revocation of religious toleration in the late seventeenth century, moving first to Prussia and then to the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire; his father Gustav ran a modest jewellery shop on Bolshaya Morskaya Street described in the trade directories as dealing in small jewellery and spectacles.
He was trained across Europe — Frankfurt, Dresden, Florence, Paris, London — and returned to Saint Petersburg in 1872, taking over the family firm a decade later. What distinguished him early was scholarship rather than ornament: he spent years working unpaid on the Hermitage's Scythian gold, restoring Greco-Scythian pieces, and the historical grounding that gave him ran through everything the house afterwards produced. A gold medal at the 1882 Pan-Russian exhibition in Moscow brought him to court attention.
In 1885 Alexander III commissioned an Easter gift for the Empress Maria Feodorovna. The Hen Egg — white enamel opening to a gold yolk, a gold hen, a miniature crown and a ruby pendant — was successful enough that Fabergé was appointed Goldsmith by Special Appointment to the Imperial Crown within weeks, and the commission was repeated almost every year until 1917. Around fifty imperial eggs were made; forty-three are known to survive.
The eggs are a small fraction of the output. The House of Fabergé became the largest jewellery firm in the empire, employing some five hundred craftsmen at 24 Bolshaya Morskaya with branches in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev and London, and producing perhaps 150,000 to 200,000 objects between 1882 and 1917 — silver, flowers carved in hardstone, animals, cigarette cases, everyday things made exceptionally well.
After the February Revolution many wealthy residents of Petrograd deposited their valuables with the firm, which had the most secure safe in the city. The business was nationalised in 1918. An attempt to protect the building by leasing it to the Swiss mission failed, and in September Fabergé left Saint Petersburg on the last diplomatic train to Riga, travelling on to Germany. His wife and eldest son crossed to Finland on foot and by sleigh; two other sons were imprisoned. He reached Switzerland in 1920 and died at Pully near Lausanne that September, aged seventy-four. His family believed he never recovered from the loss of the firm.
His sons later reopened a small workshop in Paris, but the family lost the rights to the name through mid-century commercial transactions, and the Fabergé brand today belongs to unrelated owners. The largest public collections are in the Kremlin Armoury and at the Shuvalov Palace in Saint Petersburg.
"Fled Russia in 1918; died in Lausanne, 1920"
История миграцииПрослеживая корни — Saint Petersburg (Russia)
The house was seized after the revolution. He left Russia in 1918 and died in Switzerland two years later.
Born in Saint Petersburg to a family of French Huguenot descent that had reached Russia by way of the Baltic provinces. He took over his father's firm and became goldsmith to the imperial court.
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Saint Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.