Alma Phil's designs for Faberge'

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1996 by Vivian Swift

Born in 1888, Pihl was the daughter of the Finnish Faberge workmaster Knut Oskar Pihl (1860-1897) and Fanny Florentina Holmstrom (1869-1949), the daughter of the jewelry workmaster August Wilhelm Holmstrom (1829-1903). On August Holmstrom's death, his son, Albert, took over Faberge's jewelry workshops. In 1909 Alma was given the job of sketching into the record books the jewelry made in her uncle's shop. In 1911 she became a designer in the workshop, a position she kept even after her marriage in 1912 to Nikolaj Klee (1879-1960).

Alma's first noteworthy assignment as a designer came from one of Faberge's most important clients, Dr. Emanuel Nobel, a member of the famous Swedish family of industrialists. Nobel, who lived and worked in Russia, was remembered by Faberge's chief designer, Francois Petrovich Birbaum (d. 1947), as being "so generous in his presents that at times it seemed that this was his chief occupation and delight."(3) Henry Charles Bainbridge, the director of Faberge's London branch from 1908 to 1917, recalled that for

Dr. Nobel a dinner party was no dinner at all unless all the ladies were suitably rewarded. On one of those occasions, wishing to recall a Russian winter, he conceived the idea of giving all the ladies present an icicle. Faberge carried this out in pendants and brooches in rock-crystal with a matte surface adorned with small diamonds in frost design.(4)

Alma's niece Lydia Pihl (d. 1991) recalled:

Alma remembered very vividly the day there was an order from the Nobel Office, very urgently to make up forty small pieces, preferably brooches, in a new design....As ice crystals were very frequent on the draughty window panes in those days, she suddenly got her inspiration from those.(5)

The success of Pihl's "frost flower"(6) designs for Nobel is surprising on three counts: she was a designer barely out of her apprenticeship; the reputation of the firm's designers was based on their superb re-interpretations of historic styles, not on innovative designs drawn from the everyday; and ice was a rare conceit in the decorative arts, so there were few precedents from which to draw inspiration.(7) The Nobel jewels were the first of several frost flowers designed by Pihl to commemorate the brutal Russian winter, capturing with quartz and diamonds the beautiful, cold, and fragile sparklings of ice, snow, and frost. The Faberge firm produced so many pieces based on this concept that it eventually became "very stereotyped and...a boring chore for the poor designer."(8)

Before boredom set in, however, Pihl used the theme of winter and ice for two other masterpieces. The Nobel order dates from May 1912, about the time that the Faberge firm would have been casting about for new ideas for the next year's imperial Easter eggs, one each for Czar Nicholas II to present to his mother and his wife. These two eggs would be the forty-seventh and forty-eighth in the series(9) and, according to Bainbridge, the pressure on Faberge and his workmasters each year to create eggs more marvelous than the last was "beyond endurance."(10) Sometime in 1912, this burdensome task seems to have fallen to Pihl. Using the Nobel designs as a prototype, she designed the 1913 Winter Egg (Pl. II), which was presented to the czar's mother. A beautiful whimsy of engraved rock crystal decorated with diamond-set platinum frost and icicles, it conceals a diamond-set platinum basket of white quartz wood anemones with jade leaves, alluding to Easter's lessons of resurrection and the promise of spring.

Recent research in the Russian State Archives in Moscow uncovered the original bill of sale for the Winter Egg.(11) Surprisingly, the invoice describes the egg as being made of "white topaz," a common misnomer for quartz but an unusual error to be made by a jeweler. It details the use of 1,300 rose-cut diamonds in the body, 1,378 rose-cut diamonds in the flower basket, and 360 brilliants in the borders. The cost, 24,600 rubles, is roughly equivalent to $200,000 today.

There is a clear connection between the imperial Winter Egg and Pihl's second masterpiece, the Ice Egg (Pls. III, IV), which was made for Emanuel Nobel and presented by Dr. Nobel "to a friend."(12) Its whereabouts had been unknown for many years before it resurfaced in 1994. At first glance, the Ice Egg appears rather plain, but this appearance is deceptive, for the simple silver-pearl matte ground of the eggs shell is covered with alternating layers of transparent and opaque white enamel, each layer separately painted and engraved to resemble frost. The result is an icy luster that shimmers like a cold winter morning. Inside is a watch pendant, the dial of which is wittily half-concealed by the icy burnish given to the rock-crystal case.

The final masterpiece attributed to Pihl is the Mosaic Egg, presented by Nicholas II to Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna on Easter 1914 (Pl. VI). The design is derived from a watercolor rendering dated July 24, 1913, in the record books. It depicts a circular brooch set with colored stones in a floral pattern, the effect of which is usually described as "mosaic," giving the egg its name. Bainbridge referred to the egg in his memoirs as a "cage-like jewel,"(13) which is another way of describing the ingenious skeleton of gold strips supporting a platinum grid partially set with diamonds and colored stones. It is clean, however, that the surface of both the brooch and the Easter egg was inspired by needlepoint. An artist who drew on the world around her, Pihl almost certainly took her design from the needlework fire screens that were found in every genteel sitting room at the time. Inside the egg is a fire screen-shaped "surprise" bearing portraits of the czar and czarina's five children, giving a homey, thematic unity to the entire creation.