A Fabergé jewelled gold and enamel card case, workmaster Michael Perchin, St Petersburg, 1899-1903

rectangular with rounded sides, decorated with vertical stripes of pale green and mauve translucent enamel over textured ground, overlaid with gold bands, seed pearl borders, the front mounted with an oval plaque of translucent white enamel over sunburst ground with crowned gold cipher LCR, diamond pushpiece, marked Fabergé with workmaster's initials and scratched inventory number: 4253, 56 standard, French import marks

The Kazan Collection

M. Ghosn, Objets de Vertu par Fabergé, 1996, no. 22, illustrated.

The style and palette employed on this object, made towards the end of Perchin's career, represents a move away from the Rococo and Neo-Renaissance motifs associated with much of his earlier oeuvre.  As such, it looks forward to the tenure of Wigström, to whom Perchin left his workshop on his death in 1903.  As a comparison, see G. von Habsburg and M. Lopato, Fabergé: Imperial Jeweller, 1993, no. 175, for the carnet de bal formerly in the Lansdell K. Christie Collection, which was presented by Nicholas II to Elizabeth Balletta of the Imperial National Theatre in 1902.  That object, apparently without workmaster's initials, is similar enough to the present lot to tentatively attribute it to Perchin's workshop.  See also Christie's Geneva, 17 November 1981, lot 107, for a striped enamel card case made by Perchin during the same period. 

As Michel Y. Ghosn notes in his catalogue of the Kazan Collection (p. 103), the initial R and Imperial crown tempt one to conclude that the case belonged to a member of the Romanov family.