Sunday we took a trip downtown to meet friends and tour the Houston Museum of Natural Science. It's a great museum and we enjoy seeing the exhibits, but this time we were there to see some Faberge eggs. It's near Easter, right? Time to see some lovely eggs.
The collection of Faberge on display is some of the Artie and Dorothy McFerrin collection. It's a fun story. Dorothy loved the eggs and bought one. It turned out to be a fake. She spent the rest of her life purchasing the real thing. That one egg, laughingly titled the "Fauxberge Egg" is on display along with all the other lovely things she collected during her lifetime.
Each piece is displayed and the artist named. At the peak of their popularity, Faberge had workshops in Russia, England and France. It was fun to see the artisans named because you could see who specialized in enameling and who specialized in metal work.
There were a ton of things besides eggs on display. Faberge was a jeweler, actually a family of jewelers, and their work with stone was almost as amazing as the enameled eggs. There were vessels (and eggs) carved out of onyx and nephrite. The onyx bowl here was nestled in a base of woven gold rope that was studded with gems.
There were pieces of everyday utility made with such craftsmanship that they can only be called art. Bowls, bell pushes, handbags and fans.
My favorites were the handbags. Some of them had coin holders that were spring activated and popped up coins one at a time. It was a beautiful exhibit.
But, of course, the big reason anyone goes to the HMNS is for the dinosaurs. I don't think I've ever seen a bigger display of large fossil skeletons in my life. It's massive.
So many different fossils. Some of the small ones had details I'd never seen before. Apparently, we see a lot of the 'tops' of some trilobites but the fossil record for what they looked like underneath is a little more rare.
It was a great museum visit. An older child who is enthusiastic about dinosaurs would be thrilled with this display. They tried to put the big beasts together in panorama displays and there would be an artist's rendering of what they might have looked like fleshed out with backgrounds. Pretty cool. I might have to go back again and wander through.
-- Sandee Wagner
The collection of Faberge on display is some of the Artie and Dorothy McFerrin collection. It's a fun story. Dorothy loved the eggs and bought one. It turned out to be a fake. She spent the rest of her life purchasing the real thing. That one egg, laughingly titled the "Fauxberge Egg" is on display along with all the other lovely things she collected during her lifetime.
Each piece is displayed and the artist named. At the peak of their popularity, Faberge had workshops in Russia, England and France. It was fun to see the artisans named because you could see who specialized in enameling and who specialized in metal work.
There were a ton of things besides eggs on display. Faberge was a jeweler, actually a family of jewelers, and their work with stone was almost as amazing as the enameled eggs. There were vessels (and eggs) carved out of onyx and nephrite. The onyx bowl here was nestled in a base of woven gold rope that was studded with gems.There were pieces of everyday utility made with such craftsmanship that they can only be called art. Bowls, bell pushes, handbags and fans.
My favorites were the handbags. Some of them had coin holders that were spring activated and popped up coins one at a time. It was a beautiful exhibit.
But, of course, the big reason anyone goes to the HMNS is for the dinosaurs. I don't think I've ever seen a bigger display of large fossil skeletons in my life. It's massive.
So many different fossils. Some of the small ones had details I'd never seen before. Apparently, we see a lot of the 'tops' of some trilobites but the fossil record for what they looked like underneath is a little more rare.
It was a great museum visit. An older child who is enthusiastic about dinosaurs would be thrilled with this display. They tried to put the big beasts together in panorama displays and there would be an artist's rendering of what they might have looked like fleshed out with backgrounds. Pretty cool. I might have to go back again and wander through.
-- Sandee Wagner
