centred to the top with a rectangular silver pane elaborately enamelled with towering white narcissi flowers against a background of blending oranges and yellows, the opaque enamel clock face beneath domed glass held in a rope twist bezel, its Arabic chapters unusually painted in blue, with gold minute markers and openwork yellow gold hands, mounted into a large, striking and richly figured birch panel, featuring neoclassical openwork columns above an arch and a flared pediment, supported on a similarly styled hinged wooden strut.
Chief Workmaster: Johann Viktor Aarne
St. Petersburg, 1896-1902,
inventory number: 4690.
Height: 25 cm
Width: 15.7 cm
Provenance
Grand Duchess Maria Georgievna, Princess of Greece and Denmark, daughter of King George I of Greece and first cousin of Emperor Nicholas II.
The clock was included in the exhibition of the Imperial Family’s Fabergé collection held in the Von Dervis Mansion on the English Embankment in St. Petersburg in March 1902.
The clock pictured in the Von Dervis exhibition
The enamelling on the clock is complex and reveals Fabergé’s mastery of the medium. The plants are formed from cloisons created from fine gold wires, and filled with painted translucent and opaque enamels, the flower petals are three dimensional and rounded in a technique inspired by Japanese moriage enamelling. The method was a speciality of workmaster Johann Viktor Aarne, all bar one, of the handful of examples known, are from his workshop.
Fabergé supplied works incorporating over twenty varieties of indigenous Russian and tropical woods. His premises at 24 Bolshaya Morskaya in St. Petersburg housed a carpentry workshop dedicated to producing the wooden elements of his creations. The last never finished Imperial Easter Egg of 1917, destined to be given by Emperor Nicholas II to his mother the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna was to be made of Karelian birch.
Grand Duchess Maria Georgievna, Princess of Greece and Denmark