A Fabergé jewelled vari-coloured gold and guilloché enamel carnet, Workmaster Michael Perchin, St. Petersburg, 1899-1903

shaped as a book, finely enamelled in translucent salmon pink painted en camaïeu with foliage over sunburst engine-turning radiating from a circular-cut diamond, within translucent green tied laurel border, with similar roundels bordered by rose-diamonds at the corners and four-coloured roses and foliage on matted ground in-between, the back and spine similarly decorated, containing a white moiré silk carnet and a gold reeded pencil with diamond finial, with workmaster's initials, 56 standard, held in original fitted case

Christie's Geneva, 11 May 1988, Lot 191

Michael Conforti, The Taft Museum: European Decorative Arts, 1995, p.508

There is very slight wear to the green enamel visible on the lower section of the border on the front and tiny spots of enamel loss to the border on the reverse. There are further signs of minor retouching visible under UV light.
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Franz Birbaum, Fabergé's head designer from 1895 until 1917, recorded in his memoir that the firm's jewellers used the Hermitage collections for study. He observed that they concentrated especially upon the art of the period of Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II - "many of those articles were copied with great precision and were later used as models for the creation of new compositions." This carnet made by Michael Perchin, the firm's first head workmaster, is an exceptionally sumptuous example of how Fabergé adapted 18^th century forms and motifs to produce such a composition.

The form of the carnet, with the covers pinned shut by a pencil, is based on a type that was fashionable in Paris in the mid 18^th century. Its controlled design, however, evokes the elegant classicism of the early years of the reign of Louis XVI. Further, the painted decoration of leafy tendrils and simulated moss agate derive from the work of Parisian goldsmiths of the same period. Such selective gleaning from the past is typical of Fabergé, as are the subtle modifications introduced: the slightly larger scale; the exuberance of the chasing of the floral detail; the use of more dramatic engine-turning and the remarkable quality of the enamel, for which the firm was so widely admired. The result was a new and very individual work of art.

Fabergé appears to have made relatively few carnets of this form and of those recorded several have distinguished provenances. They include one, enamelled in pink and oyster white, in the collection of H.M. the Queen of the Netherlands (illustrated Fabergé, Munich, 1986, no 472); a second, decorated with pink and white enamel stripes, given by Emperor Nicholas II to the actress Elizabeth Balletta in 1902 (illustrated Fabergé/Cartier, Munich, 2003, no. 113); and a third, enamelled in translucent salmon pink and inset with a miniature of Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, possibly suggesting an Imperial provenance, now in the Marjorie Merriweather Post Collection, Hillwood, Washington DC (inv. 11.77, illustrated Fabergé, Munich, 1986, no 507).

Most intriguing in the context of the present fully marked example is the existence of a replica, unmarked, in the Taft museum Cincinnati (inv 1932.121, illustrated Conforti, op.cit, p.508). The Taft carnet was purchased for the collection from the dealer Seligmann in New York in December 1905. Such almost contemporary duplication of works by Fabergé is not unique. For another example of this, compare a jewelled gold and bloodstone carnet, by Michael Perchin, formerly in the Wernher collection, Luton Hoo, and a parallel, but unmarked, version in the Thyssen collection (both illustrated Anna Somers Cocks and Charles Truman, The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection: Renaissance jewels, gold boxes and objets de vertu, London, 1984, pp.308/9).