When a 12-year-old girl fled St. Petersburg in 1918 in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, she did this with an aquamarine and diamond pendant sewn into the hem of her dress.
It is one of the two pendants that are newly attributed to the Russian jewelery house Fabergé, best known for its imperial Easter eggs. And both pieces must be auctioned by the British house Deweats on the control of Fabergé, Jewelery and Objects of Vertu, a sale planned for March 19 in the Dragington Priory Salesroom of the house in Newbury, about 60 miles west of London.
The auction catalog contains the hangers, as well as 59 other Fabergé plots. Geoffrey Munn, a jewelry specialist in the BBC television show “Antiques Roadshow” who consulted Dreweats about the hangers, said he was “completely convinced” that both were made by Fabergé.
The 4.3-centimeter aquamarine piece has a pear-shaped jewel surrounded by rose-cut diamonds and told with a diamond bow. The estimated selling price is 7,000 to 10,000 pounds (around $ 8,500 to $ 12,700).
It was shown last year on ‘Antiques Roadshow’, but the Fabergé connection was not known at the time. After Charlotte Peel, the head of the jewelry at Drewatts, saw a scratch of stock number on the pendant side, consult Munn Anna and Vincent Palmade, two Fabergé researchers in Maryland.
The Palmades, with the help of Dmitry Krivoshey, another researcher, corresponded to the number with that of an aquamarine and diamond hanger in the Imperial Cabinet -Grootboek van Gifts in 1912. “The Imperial Family had a shop with Fabergé item that they could just go and” said. “
The current owner, she added, inherited her mother’s piece, who was a friend of the woman who had fled Russia as a girl.
Mrs. Peel also realized that an unmarked 5-centimeter pendant, sent by a non-voided collector who has much of the Fabergé items on sale, was probably made by the Russian jeweler.
It is in the form of a grid basket, killed in old sliced diamonds and holding orange and pink enamel flowers, with diamonds between the flowers and green leaves. She said she had seen a drawing of a similar pendant from 1909 in “Fabergé: Lost and Found”, a book from 1993 by A. Kenneth Snowman, then the chairman of Wartski, an activities in London Antiques that specializes in Fabergé.
“I am sure there can be people who would not agree with us for the attribution,” said Mrs. Peel. “It’s the name of the game. But we have checked with people who have treated enough Fabergé in their lives to give us confidence in it. ‘The piece, of which Mrs. Peel said it missed a loop that may have worn maker markings, is estimated to be sold for £ 4,000 to £ 6,000.
Mr. Munn said that the discovery of the connections of the hangers was ‘extremely exciting’.
“It’s like open cast archeology,” he said. “There is no brush, no channel, no mud, no bones or something, but you put the context back in the past.”
