Easter Presents from Faberge

Of exquisite design and unfailing ingenuity, the Easter eggs made by Fabergé for the Russian Imperial family rank amongst the most extravagant and wonderful examples of the goldsmith’s art. Carl Fabergé drew on the most skilled designers and craftsmen who worked with an astoundingly wide variety of materials.  This lecture will be a celebration of these great works, and the techniques by which they were created, and will also explore the range of more modest Easter gifts and the wider context of how Easter was celebrated in Orthodox Russia in the decades leading up to the Revolution.

Clare Phillips (M.A. Royal College of Art, London) has been a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1989. As a jewellery historian she is part of the small team dedicated to the V&A’s jewellery collection and is the author of the V&A’s classic book ‘Jewels & Jewellery’. She has been responsible for the focussed jewellery content within many major V&A exhibitions from ‘Art Nouveau: 1890-1914’ in 2000 to ‘Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up’ in 2018. Her books range from Thames & Hudson’s accessible introductory text ‘Jewelry – from Antiquity to the Present’ to ‘Chaumet Tiaras: Divine Jewels’ which she co-authored in 2019. In 2006 she curated the exhibition ‘Bejewelled by Tiffany’ at the Gilbert Collection, Somerset House.