Fabergé Revealed

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond

Through Oct. 2

Call it a victory for authenticity, said Eve M. Kahn in The New York Times. Before rolling out this dazzling retrospective of works by the House of Fabergé, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts spent a grueling two years getting every item vetted by forgery expert Géza von Habsburg, who “scoured” European archives and cross-referenced bilingual invoices to weed out the fakes. The bad news for the museum: Of the more than two dozen bejeweled flowers it submitted for inspection, most were “Fauxbergés”: “Clunky arrangements of plant stalks” were among the telltale details that tripped von Habsburg’s alarms. The good news, however, is that the provenance of the 300-plus flowers, Easter eggs, jewelry boxes, and other collectibles that made the show is now “ironclad.” The resulting exhibition is as breathtaking as you might expect.

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Most people will surely come for the eggs, said Mark St. John Erickson in the Newport News, Va., Daily Press. Ever since the 1880s, when Karl Fabergé produced his first imperial Easter egg for Czar Alexander III, those ovoid baubles have been central to the jewelry house’s exalted reputation. But many other wonders await among the “endless rows of picture frames, cigarette cases, snuff boxes, and other personal gifts that the members of the imperial court exchanged.” Perhaps the most powerful testament to Fabergé’s standing in the lives of his royal clients is a star-shaped picture frame, featuring a photo of the czar’s second daughter, Tatiana. Recently, an inventory compiled after the Communists executed the Romanovs revealed that the imperial family had taken the frame with them to their deaths. Its presence here provides this show with one of its most stunning moments.