Miniature Teapot (1886–96): Art, History and Details

Miniature Teapot (1886–96) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Mikhail Evlampievich Perkhin (Russian, 1860–1903); House of Fabergé (Russian, 1842–1918).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The House of Fabergé specialized in the creation of little treasures intended as opulent personal gifts. In creating luxurious accessories for a desk or tabletop, Fabergé often used native hardstones such as multicolored agate and quartz, green nephrite, pink rhodonite, rock crystal, and pale green bowenite found in the Ural Mountains of western Russia. Fabergé's designers often paired hardstones with gold mounts, particularly in the St. Petersburg workshop where the goldsmiths were concentrated.

Object facts

• Title: Miniature Teapot
• Date: 1886–96
• Creator attribution: Mikhail Evlampievich Perkhin (Russian, 1860–1903); House of Fabergé (Russian, 1842–1918)
• Culture: Russia, St. Petersburg
• Type: Miscellaneous
• Technique: gold, bowenite
• Dimensions: Overall: 5.8 x 10.9 cm (2 5/16 x 4 5/16 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1966.479

A detail from the museum

Sometimes called "new jade," bowenite is actually considered a semiprecious gemstone. Though Fabergé obtained his supply from the Ural Mountains of Russia, bowenite is also the state mineral of Rhode Island.

Collection credit

The India Early Minshall Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hawley, Henry. Fabergé and His Contemporaries: The India Early Minshall Collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1967.
• Habsburg, Géza von, and David Park Curry. Fabergé in America. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.