There we all stood, silent, with aching hearts,
looking at the empty workshop around us. It was like being
at a funeral, as though we had lost a close and dearly loved
relative.
This is how the young journeyman engraver Jalmari
Haikonen described the last moments at the Faberge workshop
in Petrograd after the Bolsheviks had ordered its closure
in early 1918. These poignant words by one of the craftsmen
working for this legendary company may well express the feelings
of his employer, the accomplished and dedicated Henrik Wigstrom,
I workmaster of the House of Faberge.
Henrik Wigstrom had come to St. Petersburg
in 1878 and six years later went to work for M. E. Perkhin,
Faberge's I workmaster and head of the company's goldsmiths
department j So great was Perkhin's faith in the talented
Wigstrom that he bequeathed the workshop to him rather than
to his own son. When Perkhin died in 1903, the workshop passed
into the I possession of Wigstrom.
In 1918, prevented from carrying on his business
and I unwilling to remain in the troubled capital, Wigstrom
returned I with his family to his native land, to Ollila,
Kivennapa, I in Finnish Karelia, where he had his residence
secondaire. As j this was a fully furnished dacha, there was
little need to take more than the bare essentials with him.
Remembrances of times past
Among the essentials, however, Wigstrom packed
an album photographs of close friends and relatives, and another
folio-sized volume bound in half-leather. This contained almost
a , thousand illustrated drawings of objets d'art et defantaisie,
from I eggs to jewellery, made between 1911 and 1916 in his
workshop at the House of Faberge.
What persuaded Wigstrom to take the stock book
with him? Glancing through the pages today one realises that
it is a superb record of some of the finest items from Faberge's
prime. Was it just for the memories it contained, or did Wigstrom
perhaps dream of returning? Or did it contain another, more
personal association, one that has yet to be discovered?
Whatever the case, a few years after his return
Wigstrom gave the book to a close friend and neighbour. These
were difficult times in Finland for repatriates from St. Petersburg.
Relations with the Soviet Union were anything but friendly,
so people talking about their former life and work in Russia
were treated with suspicion. In exile, Wigstrom became taciturn
and retiring, living quietly at Ollila until his death in
1923. Enforced inactivity obviously weighed heavily upon someone
as creative and energetic as Wigstrom, so perhaps it was frustration
that drove him to give the book away.
Now, seventy years later, we can be very grateful
that this book of drawings found pride of place on the neighbour's
bookshelf. Surprisingly, its owner never thought of showing
it to anyone, especially in view of the tremendous publicity
surrounding the name of Faberge during the past two decades.
The book also provides a valuable complement
to the stock and sketch-books of Albert Holmstrom, hitherto
the only documentary record from a Faberge workshop in existence.
A. Kenneth Snowman had the good fortune to discover Holm-strom's
books in 1986 and has since published a number of informative
articles about them.4 These have greatly added to our understanding
of how the House of Faberge operated at the workshop level,
and they have thrown much new light on the company's production.
Due to its similarity, the Wigstrom book offers an important
new source of material from another Faberge workshop.
The workshop of August Holmstrom and his son
Albert produced most of Faberge's jewellery. Mikhail Perkhin's
workshop - and from 1903 on, Henrik Wigstrom's workshop -concentrated
on objects of function and fantasy, and only to a lesser extent
on jewellery. As shall be seen, however, these workshops were
never strict compartments, for they produced each others'
specialties whenever necessary. In any hierarchy of the Faberge
workshops, that of Perkhin/Wigstrb'm certainly came first,
for it was there that the most demanding commissions, such
as the Imperial eggs, were made. Perkhin, after all, was the
chief master goldsmith of the company and under Wigstrom,
Faberge experienced its most rapid period of growth and expansion.
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