The Fabergé Heritage Council
The Council was formed in 2007 to counsel the unified Fabergé brand in its pursuit of excellence and exclusivity and to advise and provide guidance on Peter Carl Fabergé and his legacy.
Founder members are Sarah Fabergé, Peter Carl Fabergé’s Great Granddaughter who is also Fabergé’s Director of Special Projects and John Andrew, a connoisseur and Fabergé’s Archivist.
The third member is the world-renowned Fabergé expert, Dr Géza von Habsburg who is also Fabergé’s Curatorial Director.
Past founder members were Theo Fabergé 1922-2007 and Tatiana Fabergé 1930-2020.
Sarah Fabergé
A great-granddaughter of Peter Carl Fabergé, Sarah, like her late father Theo has always been interested in the arts. A creative at heart, she pursued a career in management training and development until she decided to work solely with Fabergé Limited in 2007, with the objective of helping to resurrect and reposition Fabergé as a creator of high and fine jewellery and objet d’art. Her son Joshua is Fabergé's E‑Commerce Executive.
A keen supporter of the artisan and individual craftsmanship, Sarah is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Turners, one of the oldest Livery Companies in the City of London. It supports the craft of turning on a lathe and aims to raise the profile of this unique art through its Wizardry in Wood exhibitions and competitions.
As a founding member of the Fabergé Heritage Council and Director of Special Projects, she works closely with the Fabergé team and, as an ambassador for the company, represents Fabergé at a variety of events both in the UK and overseas.
Géza Von Habsburg
Géza von Habsburg studied at the Universities of Fribourg and Bern (Switzerland), Munich and Florence and has a Ph.D. in History of Art and Archaeology with a thesis on the stained glass windows of Florence Cathedral.
He was Chairman of Christie’s in Switzerland from 1967 to 1984; of Christie’s Europe from 1980 to 1984; and of Habsburg International Auctions from 1987 to 1991, specialising in European and Russian Applied Arts. He taught at the New York School of Design, at the Bard Graduate Center for the Decorative Art, at New York University, and lectured for 10 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He curated the pioneering “Fabergé, Court Jeweller to the Tsars” at the Munich Kunsthalle in 1986 with loans from the Royal Collection, from numerous European Royal Houses, from the late King of Thailand, and as a first, from the Hermitage Museum and the Kremlin Armoury Museum, USSR, which attracted 250,000 visitors.
As Director of the Fabergé Arts Foundation he curated, together with Dr. Marina Lopato, Curator at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Pertersburg “ since 2007 and acts Fabergé Imperial Court Jeweller” in 1993/4, which travelled from Russia to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris and the V&A in London, which attracted 650,000 visitors. This was co-sponsored by Fabergé, Paris.
In 1996/7 he curated “Fabergé in America” on behalf of the San Francisco Museum of Arts, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, attracting 400,000 visitors; travelled to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Richmond VA; New Orleans, LS; and Cleveland OH, totalling over 1 million visitors nationwide. This exhibition was sponsored by Fabergé USA.
In 2000 he curated “Fabergé and his World” in Wilmington DE, on behalf of the Broughton Organization with over 1000 international loans (300,000 visitors); in 2003 he was curator of “Fabergé/Cartier, Rivals at the Imperial Court of Russia” on behalf of the Munich Kunsthalle, with substantial loans from the Musée Cartier, Geneva and from the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (1,100 exhibits, 240,000 visitors).
In 2011 he was named Fabergé Guest Curator of the Virginia Museum of Arts, Richmond, wrote “Fabergé Revealed”, the catalogue of the museum’s Russian collection and in 2013 organized its exhibition which later travelled to Detroit, Salem (Boston), Montreal, Las Vegas, Oklahoma and the Palace Museum, Beijing.
He wrote/co-wrote 15 books and catalogues on the History of Collecting, Russian Art and Fabergé, some of which have been translated into Russian, German, French and Italian.
He travels regularly to Russia and Japan and lectures worldwide in three languages. He is Visiting Professor at Shujitsu University in Okayama, Japan, and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Fabergé Museum, St. Petersburg and of the Hermitage Museum Foundation, New York. He is President of the International Friends of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Honorary President of the Friends of the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest; and Board member of the Friends of Dresden. He serves yearly on the panel of experts for Russian art at the prestigious TEFAF art fair in Maastricht; and since 2016 at the newly founded TEFAF in New York.
He is a great-great-grandson of Emperor Franz-Joseph of Austria; a grandson of King Frederick Augustus III of Saxony and, in addition to English, speaks French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Hungarian.
Géza has been Curatorial Director at Fabergé since 2007 and acts as historian, lecturer, expert on vintage pieces and spokesperson for the company.
John Andrew
John maintains that he was born a collector as he has been acquisitive for as long as he can remember. He has had an interest in Fabergé for 40 years and during the 1990s he formed a small collection of pieces from the era of Peter Carl Fabergé.
A Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars, an Associate of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths and a Member of the Incorporation of Goldsmiths of the City of Edinburgh, he is also Curator of The Pearson Silver Collection, which is the largest collection of post World War II and contemporary British designer silver in private hands. Part of it was exhibited at SFO Museum in San Francisco during 2018-2019. During the 6.5 months of the exhibition the footfall through the gallery where it was exhibited was an estimated 4.25 million of which 700,000 stopped to engage with the pieces.
In addition to his interest in the history of Fabergé prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917, he has researched the use of the Fabergé name in what he calls ‘the twilight years’ after the Revolution when it initially became associated with perfume and finally with a range of household cleaning brands.
Tatiana Fabergé (1930-2020)
A great-granddaughter of Peter Carl Fabergé, Tatiana was the daughter of Theodore and Tatiana Fabergé (neé Cheremeteff). Born in Geneva in 1930, Tatiana studied jewellery design in Paris during the early 1950s, where she was in close contact with her uncles Eugene and Alexander Fabergé who ran Fabergé & Cie, which traded in and restored objects made by the House of Fabergé as well as general jewellery and objets d’art. They gave her first hand information about the House of Fabergé.
After her period of study she worked with her father, designing various precious objects that were crafted in Paris and Geneva. She has always been interested in the House of Fabergé and since she retired from CERN she has worked researching the family history and promoting its heritage. With glasnost resulting in the Soviet Union opening its historical archives, the opportunity arose for discovering new aspects of Fabergé’s history. She collaborated with Valentin Skurlov, a Fabergé scholar based in St Petersburg, who in 1989 staged the first exhibition of Fabergé in the USSR. Skurlov found the manuscript memoirs of Franz Birbaum in the archives of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Birbaum was Peter Carl Fabergé’s Swiss head master craftsman from 1896 through to the demise of the firm when it was nationalised and its stock confiscated by the Soviets in 1919. This resulted in their first joint publication, the privately published “The History of the House of Fabergé”, which were Birbaum’s memoirs in Russian with an English translation.
“The Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs” was published n 1997. Tatiana co-authored it with Lynette Proler and Valentin Skurlov and included the first ever catalogue raisonné of the Easter eggs Fabergé produced from 1885 for the Emperors Alexandra III and Nicholas II. This was the first book exclusively on Fabergé’s Imperial Eggs to have been written after the opening of the archives in Russia and consequently drew on previously unseen material, including the original Fabergé invoices. The book therefore broke new ground with the catalogue presenting the eggs in chronological order. This was based on the then known eggs and the descriptions in the archives. Several eggs, which had been regarded as ‘Imperial’ for many year lost this status as they had not been bought by the reigning Emperor. The Forbes Collection boasted a dozen Imperial Eggs prior to the publication of the book, but afterwards this was reduced to nine. Kip Forbes and Tatiana remained on good terms, despite the reclassification.
The story of how the family lost its name is told in the Timeline on this website. Tatiana of course saw the distress that this caused the family. After Fabergé Inc was acquired by Unilever in 1989, she visited the company’s offices in Paris to explain the importance of the name it had acquired. She later realised that this is probably why it registered the Fabergé name as a trademark across a wide range of merchandise internationally and began granting licenses to third parties to make and sell a range of products under the Fabergé brand. In 2007 Tatiana was the first member of the family to agree to participate in the new venture to relaunch Fabergé.
While working for Fabergé, a great deal was going on behind the scenes. After the publication of the Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs (the egg book), work was begun on a book that would be the definitive work on Fabergé. While this was in progress scholars were questioning the chronology in the egg book. The change to the egg book’s chronology did not detract from the sterling research work undertaken by Tatiana and her co-authors. “Fabergé: A Comprehensive Connoisseur’s Reference Book” by Tatiana Fabergé, Eric-Alain Kohler and Valentin Skurlov was published in 2012. It sheds new light on the House of Fabergé and includes archive material both in the form of documents and photographs that had not previously been published.
Tatiana was a pillar of the Fabergé community. She spoke at least five languages and had friends in many parts of the world.
THEO FABERGÉ (1922-2007)
Theodore (known as Theo) was a grandson of Peter Carl Fabergé. His parents were Dorise Cladish and Nicholas Fabergé, but he was raised in London by his maternal aunt and her husband. Naturally creative and artistic, he excelled at technical drawing, fine instrument making, engineering and design. He served in the Royal Air Force during World War 2. In 1974, he sold his successful engineering business and began to earn a living restoring antiques and creating objets d'art.
A true designer maker, he excelled at ornamental turning and in 1978 submitted a box, made to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of HM Queen Elizabeth II into an annual competition organised by the Worshipful Company of Turners for which he was awarded the Lady Gertrude Crawford Medal, the highest award for ornamental turning. He was also granted the honour of Freeman Prizeman of the Turners Company. His work was much admired. In 1984 he entered a life-long contract to create, design and approve designs for a company called The Saint Petersburg Collection with whom he travelled the world extensively.
"Theo Fabergé whose artistry and creative genius brought immeasurable joy and beauty to our lives."
The Lawrence Family
Perrysburg, Ohio, USA
