carved from a single piece of light green bowenite, the eyes mounted with two rubies in gold collets, its back meticulously carved with dimples to capture the distinctive texture of a frog’s skin, the underside engraved with webbed feet.
The form is taken directly from Japanese netsuke carvings, an eighteenth example of which can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (No.: 10.211.2010).
Illustrated
Two closely comparable frog carvings by Fabergé were exhibited in ‘Japonisme: From Falize to Fabergé the Goldsmith and Japan (Wartski, 2o11) and ‘A Private Collection of 150 works by Carl Fabergé’ (Wartski, 2012). They are illustrated in the accompanying catalogues.
Carl Fabergé (1846 – 1920) owned a significant collection of Japanese works of art, which proved to be a valuable source of inspiration for his own work. A photograph of his apartment in Morskaya Street shows a display case filled with over 500 netsuke. It is likely that Fabergé acquired many of these pieces from a shop called ‘Japan’ which was situated on the Nevsky Prospect in St Petersburg during the turn of the 19th century.
With the restoration of the Meiji in 1868, the borders of Japan were opened to international trade. This lead to a Europe wide fascination with Japanese works of art. Many of Fabergé’s customers were keen collectors of Japanese artefacts (as an example Mrs A A Watney Weguelin, a regular customer of Fabergé’s London branch, built an impressive collection of netsuke carvings which were sold at Christies after her death in 1938).
Franz Birbaum, who managed Fabergé’s workshop, mentioned in his memoirs that it was the firm’s acquaintance with Chinese and Japanese works of art which ‘first stimulated [them] to produce work of this kind.’