Good afternoon dear friends. When it comes to the jewelers of the Russian imperial court, we first of all think of Carl Faberge, the author of Easter eggs, precious cigarette cases and other items that served as gifts for the royal family. However, the honorary title of court jeweler or court purveyor was also held by other skilled jewelers and silversmiths.
Let’s go through the list and note the most worthy and brightest.
Jeremiah Pozier
A favorite of three empresses, Pozier became famous for making the great imperial crown for Catherine II’s accession to the throne in 1762. She crowned all future emperors up to Nicholas II. Made from two hemispheres, symbolizing the union of East and West, the crown is adorned with 4936 Indian diamonds totaling 2858 carats, 75 pearls and surmounted by a large spinel. However, its total weight is not so great – a little less than 2 kilograms. In addition, the product was completed in record time – two months.
Pozier was a great master of polishing precious stones and especially diamonds, and this quality was highly appreciated by his crowned patrons – Anna Ioannovna, Elizabeth Petrovna and Catherine II. During their reign, the court literally shone. In his memoirs of life in Russia, Pozier noted: “The ladies of the court wear an astonishing amount of diamonds, and even in their private lives they never go out without precious jewelry.”
Pozier ended up in Russia as a child – according to legend, he and his father arrived in St. Petersburg on foot at the invitation of a relative who was a surgeon at the court of Peter I. The father soon died, and the boy became a student of the French jeweler Gravereaux, who worked with diamonds.
Bouquet of precious stones 1740s
At the age of 21, Jeremiah Pozier already had his own workshop, which served the court and the aristocracy for a quarter of a century. An interesting fact: in addition to diamond-studded cigarette cases, buckles, brooches, medals, high-top combs, Pauziers also produced cheaper jewelry for less affluent customers. Some of the precious metals in them had been replaced with frosted glass with colored foil, but so cleverly that no one in the yard noticed the difference.
Imperial crown 1762
Bolin dynasty
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when girls from the imperial family got married, dowries were collected for the Grand Duchesses. Silver cutlery was ordered from Faberge, and jewelry from Bolin. This fact eloquently speaks of trust in the company and the exclusivity of orders.
Bolin is one of the oldest jewelry dynasties. Andrei Rempler, a native of Saxony, founded the company in 1796 in St. Petersburg. He managed to become the court jeweler of the emperors Paul I and Alexander I. His business was continued by his sons-in-law, the German Ernst Jahn and the Swede Karl Eduard Bolin. It was his name that has survived to this day – shortly before the revolution, one of his descendants, Vasily Bolin, took models and sketches and went to Germany to establish a branch in the resort town of Bad Hohenburg, where the European elite loved to relax.
Decorative stand
However, the First World War broke out and he stayed longer in Europe, and returning to Stockholm, he arranged with a local banker to open a fashion store, which was visited by the Swedish king Gustav V. A year later, the Russian revolution broke out, and Bolin’s St. Petersburg company was closed, and the Swedish Bolin’s subsidiary still supplies jewelry to His Royal Highness.
Bolin was famous for his exquisite and very expensive jewelry. When in 1870 at the All-Russian Exhibition the next prize was awarded to jewelers, the wording was “for impeccably clean jewelry work, skillful selection of stones and elegance of drawings for the long time of the company’s existence.”
Unfortunately, very few of these works have survived – the Bolsheviks looked for them, took out stones from them and sold them separately. One of the surviving jewelry now belongs to Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain – a diamond tiara with large pearl pendants. It was made to the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, the wife of the younger brother of Alexander III. After the revolution, with the help of British diplomats, it was taken out of Russia, and then became the property of Queen Mary of England, the wife of George V and the grandmother of the current queen.
Egg. Late 19th – early 20th century.
Drawing of an onyx dish, 1910s
IP Sazikov company
One of the companies, founded in the late 18th century, made a serious bid for its activities at the 1851 World’s Fair in London. However, unlike Bolin, who also excelled there, Ignatius Sazikov introduced the national “Russian style”. Firstly, his silverware workshop was founded in Moscow and produced all kinds of silver utensils – from small spoons to church utensils and accessories, and even iconostases.
Items had different artistic and price levels – from simple to exclusive, intended for the imperial court and exhibitions.
The most famous of the dynasty was the son of the founder of the company, Ignatius Sazikov. For his skill he was called “the Russian Benvenuto Cellini”. And it was he who invented the use of forms of ancient Russian utensils and rustic style motifs, initiating a trend that became incredibly popular in jewelry in the second half of the 19th century.
Tea and coffee service
Sazikov attracted great artists and sculptors to work. For example, for the wedding of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich (the younger brother of Alexander II), the company made a silver service with Byzantine ornaments according to the design of Fyodor Solntsev, an archaeologist and connoisseur of ancient Russian art. And Eugene Lanceray participated in the creation of a cabinet sculpture depicting three horses.
The workshops and factories of the company existed until the beginning of 1887, and then became the property of the Khlebnikov company.
Stylized sea shell for nuts, 1859
IP Khlebnikov company
The gold, silver and diamond factory of Ivan Khlebnikov did not have a long history (it was founded in 1871), but was popular and was a supplier not only to the Russian court, but also to the Dutch and Danish royal courts. The main direction of production was the “Russian style”, the masters became famous, first of all, for their ability to reproduce the texture of other materials in silver – wood and fabric. Wicker baskets with a linen napkin, made entirely of silver, look “real”.
Much attention was paid to enamel – stationery and snuff boxes were covered with multi-colored drawings. Almost every object was created by the imagination – a salt shaker in the form of a throne, crockery imitating ancient bowls and vessels, inkwells in the shape of houses, a samovar in the form of a rooster with cups on chicken legs.
Ladle
Cups were popular, which could only be placed upside down on the table – below you could see sculptures of dancing villagers. Scenes from Russian history are used in the decor of expensive gifts – scenes from the life of Sergei Radonezhsky and Ivan the Terrible.
Khlebnikov’s company often completed orders for the Kremlin – its craftsmen made the iconostasis of the Annunciation Cathedral of the Kremlin and church utensils for the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
Toilet box, 1908-1917
Company Ovchinnikov P.A.
The company was called one of the trendsetters in the jewelry market before the revolution. Its founder, Pavel Ovchinnikov, was a serf and was given his freedom for his great ability to draw. The company’s products were designed in the “Russian style”, but had their own distinctive features.
The main merit of the factory is that it revived and developed enamel. The cups and fittings of the icons were decorated with the finest openwork enamel – the pattern on the surface of the object was obtained with the help of a thin twisted silver thread, the recesses of the figure were filled with colored enamel. Even more complex was the “stained glass enamel”, first applied at the Ovchinnikov factory, which does not have a solid base and, when lit, looks like a stained glass window in a Gothic cathedral.
Casket, 1882
The craftsmen also used the ancient technique of black or niello, in which engraved images with views of the Kremlin and Moscow churches were created from an alloy of silver, lead, sulfur and other components. One of the largest orders of the company was a luxurious silver gilded iconostasis in the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin.
Another important innovation was the school founded by Ovchinnikov at the factory, where talented young people studied the art of working with gold and silver for 5-6 years. Among the 19th century manufacturers, he was one of the first to realize the importance of art education.
Kaibel Co.
The Kaibel jewelry dynasty, whose roots go back to Germany, worked in St. Petersburg for the Empress since the end of the 18th century.
However, their most famous products were the insignia that the company produced in the second half of the 19th century. Since 1841, Wilhelm Kaibel, and later his son and grandson, became the only official masters of the Order of the Chapter (in Tsarist Russia, orders and medals were issued by a state body) and remained so until the end of the 19th century.
Despite the strict rules, Wilhelm Kaibel made changes to the form of some awards – in front of him, the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky depicted eagles with folded wings, as on the coins of that time.
A serious competitor of Kaibel is the Edward company, which was designated as the second official supplier of Kapitul, and by 1910 the production of Kaibel had ceased.
Here, it turns out, how many craftsmen worked in the jewelry field during the reign of Russian autocrats. Did you know about them before?
