When a 12-year-old girl fled St. Petersburg in 1918 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, she did so with an aquamarine and diamond pendant sewn into the hem of her dress.
It is one of two pendants newly attributed to the Russian jewelry house Fabergé, best known for its Imperial Easter eggs. And both pieces are to be auctioned by the British house Dreweatts at The Mastery of Fabergé, Jewellery and Objects of Vertu, a sale scheduled for March 19 at the house’s Donnington Priory salesroom in Newbury, about 60 miles west of London.
The auction catalog features the pendants, as well as 59 other Fabergé lots. Geoffrey Munn, a jewelry specialist on the BBC television show “Antiques Roadshow” whom Dreweatts consulted about the pendants, said he was “completely convinced” that both had been made by Fabergé.
The 4.3-centimeter aquamarine piece features a pear-shaped gem surrounded by rose-cut diamonds and topped with a diamond bow. The estimated sale price is 7,000 to 10,000 pounds (around $8,500 to $12,700).
It was featured last year on “Antiques Roadshow,” but the Fabergé connection was not known at the time. After Charlotte Peel, the head of jewelry at Dreweatts, spotted a scratched inventory number on the pendant’s side, Mr. Munn consulted Anna and Vincent Palmade, two Fabergé researchers in Maryland.
The Palmades, with the help of Dmitry Krivoshey, another researcher, matched the number to that of an aquamarine and diamond pendant in the Imperial Cabinet Ledger of gifts in 1912. “The imperial family had a store of Fabergé items in their palace that they could just go into and select things to give as gifts,” Mrs. Peel said.
The current owner, she added, inherited the piece from her mother, who was a friend of the woman who had fled Russia as a girl.
Mrs. Peel also realized that an unmarked 5-centimeter pendant, consigned by an unidentified collector who owns many of the Fabergé items in the sale, was likely made by the Russian jeweler.
It is in the shape of a latticework basket, edged in old-cut diamonds, and holding orange and pink enamel flowers, with diamonds tucked among the blooms and green leaves. She said she had seen a drawing of a similar pendant from 1909 in “Fabergé: Lost and Found,” a 1993 book by A. Kenneth Snowman, then the chairman of Wartski, a London antiques business that specializes in Fabergé.
“I’m sure there might be people who would disagree with us on the attribution,” Mrs. Peel said. “It’s the name of the game. But we have checked with people who’ve handled enough Fabergé in their lifetime to give us confidence in it.” The piece, which Mrs. Peel said was missing a loop that might have carried maker marks, is estimated to sell for £4,000 to £6,000.
Mr. Munn said the discovery of the pendants’ connections was “enormously exciting.”
“It’s like open cast archaeology,” he said. “There’s no brush, no channel, no mud, no bones or anything, but you’re putting the context back on the past.”
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