Word: faberg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Bond glanced up across the baccarat board and allowed his smile to widen into a yawn. "I'll cover the bet with this Fabergé egg if you don't very much mind...
What the two exhibitions show above all is Fabergé's astonishing diversity. The artifacts range from relatively austere stone boxes and clocks, perfume flacons, letter openers and an art nouveau cigarette case given to Edward VII, to what Fabergé called his objets de fantaisie: a windup, tail-wagging silver rhinoceros, a love-sick frog on a silver column, and-in jade, nephrite, agate, chalcedony, quartzite and other gem stones-a dormouse out of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a litter of four sleeping piglets, and minimenageries of meticulously observed birds, fish and beasts...
Among the most consummate works are enameled sprays of flowers and fruits; to ensure verisimilitude, Fabergé kept a garden on top of his Moscow workshop. Some of these beauties, priceless today, originally sold for less than $1,000 each...
...some 250,000 Fabergé pieces extant, not one was actually made by the master. His genius, while he presided over more than 500 artisans, was to impart an aesthetic that, for all the opulence of the materials, was by and large controlled and even understated...
...Cooper-Hewitt exhibition, they should be judged by the affable spirit in which [they] were originally created-an uncomplicated desire to give pleasure, albeit within the framework of an efficiently organized business house." Another scholar, Sir Roy Strong of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, observes that Fabergé's work "was almost the last expression of court art within the European tradition, which brings with it a passionate conviction of the importance of craftsmanship and inventiveness of design, aligned to a celebration of the virtues of wit and fantasy applied to everyday objects that still...