Circular, enameled overall in steel blue over a wavy guilloché gold ground, the detachable cover with a berried laurel gold band and with a rosette in the center, all within white champlevé enamel bands, marked inside cover and base with 'Fabergé' in Cyrillic, workmaster's initials, and 72 zolotnik gold standard (18k)
2 in. (5.2 cm.) diameter

Exhibition catalogue, Fabergé: Exhibition for the Benefit of the Scholarship Fund of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, 1983, p. 65, no. 149 (illustrated).

New York, A La Vieille Russie, Fabergé: Exhibition for the Benefit of the Scholarship Fund of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, April 22 - May 21, 1983, no. 149

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Lot Essay

The present bonbonnière with scratched inventory number '17494' is recorded in the inventory lists prepared by Eugène Fabergé, Carl Fabergé's son, for the return of London stock to Petrograd after the shop's closure in 1917. It is unclear what happened to those items after they were returned, as only a handful of objects from those lists are known. It is possible that they were confiscated and sold by the Soviet regime together with the rest of the stock.

The colour of the enamel on the present bonbonnière is rather rare. Henry Bainbridge, the manager of the London Fabergé shop, wrote in his daybook that 'steel blue' was fashionable in London in 1910 and should be 'remembered for a few articles' (K. McCarthy, Fabergé in London: The British Branch of the Imperial Russian Goldsmith, United Kingdom, 2017, p. 221).

We are grateful to Dmitry Krivoshei for his assistance with the research of the present lot.