Faberge bell pushes

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2000 by James Hurtt

Visiting Saint Petersburg in 1936, the English author Violet Trefusis (1894-1972) wrote: "The only reminder that you are in Russia is supplied by chaplets of Faberge Easter eggs, BELL-PUSHES, little animals made of quartz, jade, carnelian: the Grand Dukes were wont to lavish such presents on their intimates." [1] Trefusis was describing one of the salons of Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna (r. 1894-1917) in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo near Saint Petersburg. However, she was no stranger to the sight of little tables strewn with baubles made by the workshop of Peter Carl Faberge, for her mother, Alice Keppel (1869-1947), was both a recipient and a bestower of Faberge objets de fantaisie. (In 1908 Mrs. Keppel presented her friend Edward VII, the king of England, with a blue-enameled cigarette case embellished with a serpent in diamonds, which is one of Faberge's most recognized cigarette cases.) Moreover, Trefusis was the intimate friend of Victoria Mary (Vita) Sackville-West (1892-1962), whose mother, Lad y Sackville-West, also possessed many Faberge whimsies.

Photographs and surviving inventories and invoices reveal that Faberge bell pushes were an integral part of the Russian imperial family's interior decor. [2] Not merely decorative, they were used to summon the family's courtiers and servants: there were at least six hundred retainers with the imperial family at Tsarskoe Selo, and twelve hundred were stationed at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. [3] Indeed, servants were deemed so necessary that even after the revolutionary upheavals in 1917, the provisional government allowed the Romanovs to take thirty-nine courtiers, retainers, and servants with them to Siberia. One wonders which bell pushes they might have packed.

Fashionable and useful in middle-class as well as aristocratic households, bell pushes made it clear that the owner could afford both electricity and servants. Faberge made them from the late 1880s until about 1917, and while they have been fairly well represented in exhibitions of Faberge's work over the past half century, very little has been written about them.

Faberge's London shop sold twelve bell pushes between July 1913 and July 1914. [4] If this was a typical year, the London shop alone could easily have sold more than one hundred during the years of its existence--between 1903 and 1917. Faberge's stores in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa were all much larger than the London one, suggesting that the firm may have produced and sold several thousand bell pushes altogether. I have been able to trace 250 examples in museums, private collections, and in the marketplace, but certainly others must exist. Of those I have seen or read about, each is unique, although sometimes the differences are very subtle, such as a different guilloche pattern or a slightly different enamel color.

Faberge's workmasters used every material at their disposal in making bell pushes--gold, silver, platinum, ivory wood, enamel, and hardstones, such as nephrite, lapis lazuli, orletz, bloodstone, obsidian, agate, quartz, and bowenite. Cabochon-cut gemstones were almost always used for the push-piece, most often moonstone or mecca stone (chalcedony stained blue-gray or pink), and these were often surrounded by rose diamonds or half pearls. Garnets, sapphires, amethysts, and rubies were also frequently used, and even faceted diamonds were pressed into service as push-pieces (see Pls. II, VIII, XI, XII, and XIV).

Faberge bell pushes exhibit almost as much diversity in design as the firm's celebrated photograph frames and cigarette cases, and with the exception of the imperial Easter eggs they are the fullest manifestation of its workmasters' genius. They made them in every conceivable shape--square (with sharp or rounded corners), circular, oval, ovoid, octagonal, triangular, fan-shaped, and pyramidal--and embellished them in a variety of styles, from neo-Renaissance (see P1. II) to early art deco, including Louis XIV, XV, XVI, Empire, and art nouveau (see P1. V). [5] They had at their disposal more than 140 colors of enamel and dozens of guilloche patterns. Decoration could be chased or applied, such as borders of silver or gold, or floral swags, laurel wreaths, and stylized scrolls in varicolored gold. The often-whimsical designs cleverly conceal the practical function of the pushes. The example in Plate VIII is activated by pressing the cabochon garnet surmounting the rock crystal dome, under which a nephrite frog climbs a silver-gilt ladder. [6] A customer who did not see anything appealing in stock could have a bell push designed specially

Animals are often part of the most memorable designs, particularly rabbits, elephants (see P1. VII), owls, and sea creatures such as turtles (see P1. IX) or crabs. The Grand Duchess Anastasia Mikhailovena owned a silver and chalcedony crab in which the eyes acted as the push-pieces (P1. XII). According to the London shop's sales ledgers, the Princess Hatzfeldt paid eight pounds in 1910 for the silver bell push in the shape of a bear shown in Plate XI. [7] Elephants, the most popular animal in Faberge's menagerie of stone figures, are also prominent in the firm's designs for bell pushes (see P1. VII). In his office in the Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen, Christian IX (r. 1863-1906) of Denmark, where the Order of the Elephant is the nation's highest decoration, used a bell push composed of an obsidian elephant on a red-and-white enamel carpet, set on a stepped bowenite base. [8] The Czarina Maria Feodorovna (1847-1928), Christian IX's daughter, reputedly owned another bell push featuring an elephant, this one of bloodstone with a cabochon ruby push-piece set in an enameled gold howdah. Mikhail Evlampievich Perkhin (or Michael Perchin) made both before his death in 1903.