Fauxbergé

The reason for this was that only 50 Imperial Easter Eggs were completed, while general Fabergé objects and jewelry items could exist in high numbers.

With over 500 craftsmen and designers working for the company in its heyday, under Peter Carl Fabergé's 35-year tenure as head of the firm, it is believed that over 200,000 objects - from pins, brooches, bracelets, tiaras, umbrella handles, picture frames, flower studies, presentation boxes, snuff boxes, cigarette cases, clock cases and all sorts of objets d'art - were produced between 1882 and 1917.

[10] Imitators were already a problem during the company's heyday and it is not always possible to distinguish the finer works of the Petersburg jewellers Ivan Britsyn, Alexander Tillander or Karl Hahn from Fabergé's mass output.

[11] Other competitors, such as Cartier and Tiffany's, also started to sell similar objects and even bought from the same sources, especially the stone animals, which are never stamped or engraved and can be mistaken for Fabergé originals.

"[13] According to an account describing the process to his mistress:[14] His face beaming with pride, he demonstrated to Bettye how the nineteenth-century tools provided the appearance of an authentic Fabergé signature.

[35] Following the Hermitage scandal, a research article published in February 2021 by the BBC revealed, amongst other information, that in the late 1990s, Ivanov was allowed to study and photograph Fabergé pieces kept in the Fersman Mineralogical Museum in Moscow.

However, pieces very similar to those in the Fersman were exhibited in the Hermitage as real, like a carved stone figurine called Soldier of the Reserves (1915).

Regarding Ivanov's hardstone animals on display at his private museum in Germany, the art dealer who publicly denounced the scandalous Hermitage exhibition commented in an article:[42] I was contacted some years ago by Evgeny Belousov, who used to work for the stonecutting workshop opened by Alexander Leventhal in St Petersburg in 2002.

The workshop's leading client, recalls Belousov, was Alexander Ivanov – owner of the so-called ‘Fabergé Museum’ in Baden-Baden, where forgeries are two-a-pfennig.

I can't give the exact number of items handled by Leventhal's workshop, but I reckon there were at least 200.’ Ivanov did not seem to be putting these works up for sale, thought Belousov – ‘at least not publicly… all the items quietly found their way into his private museum.’Oher well-known names include Naum Nicolaevsky, his brother-in-law Vasily Konovalenko and Edward Singer.

[43] Starting in the 1960s in Russia (during the Soviet era), they specialised in the sale of genuine enameled items, from which they removed old marks and replaced them with those of Fabergé, but their greatest success was the carved stone figurines of people and animals, which found their way onto the Western market.