Well, that was fun... Thank you to all who joined Kieran McCarthy of Wartski (in the Fabergé corner) and me (team Cartiers) as we battled it out at the V&A in our Rivals on Bond Street talk.
We dived into the colourful history of two families, similar in many ways: both took a leap of faith and established a business in the 1840s, both founders passed it on to their sons three decades later, both families struggled to keep their firm alive through adversity and both were determined to make lasting pieces of the highest quality for some of the best clients in the world.
I talked about the Cartiers' "Never Copy, Only Create" motto and whether Fabergé was the exception to the rule, looking at examples like the animals — the kangaroos in the fifth image stumped most people: it's Fabergé on the right and Cartier on the left.
We also considered how less-than-thrilled Jacques Cartier would have been when Fabergé moved next door on New Bond Street, and dived into the lives — and bejewelled purchases — of their colourful clients: from the Jeff Bezos of the day, Ernest Cassel (with his fantastic Fabergé roulette wheel and Cartier diamond fern brooches) to the divisive Mrs Greville ("a galumphing, greedy, snobbish old toad who watered her chops at the sight of royalty," according to Cecil Beaton), whose legendary collection of Cartier jewellery was bequeathed to Queen Elizabeth in 1942 and whose gift of a Fabergé dog — in the likeness of King Edward VII's dog, Caesar — to Queen Alexandra in 1910 is now part of the museum's Fabergé exhibition.
We ended by looking at the What If: what if the revolution hadn't put an end to Carl Fabergé's work? Would the next generation of Fabergés have been able to adapt their offering like the Cartiers did, or were they too fractured as a family to reach those heights, lacking that secret ingredient that the Cartier brothers had in droves — an incredibly tight bond and a shared ambition to be the best?
Wonderful to share the stories with so many of you — we hear it was a record-breaking event for the V&A. Looking forward to a rematch at some point, as there was still so much we could have said and shown. An hour goes too fast!
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