Fabergé silver table lighter, workmaster Julius Rappoport, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1904-1908

Silver, cotton (?) wick

15/16 x 3 3/8 x 5 1/8 in. (2.4 x 8.5 x 13 cm) 

Inv. no. ab_0321

Fabergé workmaster Julius Rappoport (1850/51-1917) is particularly well known for his minutely detailed and stunningly lifelike silver studies of animals designed to impress as well as to carry out some practical function, usually as a lighter. As the photographs show, he has taken special care to work the entire surface so that if, or when, the lighter was picked up or turned upside down, the illusion was not interrupted by a smooth surface lacking detail.

He was born Isak Abramovich Rappoport in what is now Dotnuva, Lithuania. By 1883 he had opened his own silver workshop in St. Petersburg, where his talent caught the eye of Karl Fabergé. Rappoport was a gifted silversmith who also made fine dinner services, candelabra, and even rare examples of silver-mounted wood furniture. He became Fabergé’s chief silversmith and was called upon to produce the firm’s most important commissions, including silver dowry services for Grand Duchesses Ksenia and Olga Alexandrovna, daughters of Alexander III. In the early 1890s, Isak Rappoport converted to the German Evangelical Lutheran church, taking the new first name Julius Alexandrovich. Official anti-Semitism made it difficult, if not impossible, for a Jew to be included among Suppliers to the Imperial Court. The state officially encouraged conversion to Russian Orthodoxy. Rappoport’s choice to become Lutheran, still considered a “foreign” church inside Russia, seems to be a small gesture of protest against this system of discrimination.