Notes of a Jeweler of the Imperial Court – Style

This fall, the ALROSA company launched the cultural and educational project Posie, designed to study the best traditions of the Russian jewelry school and rethink them in modern works of jewelry art. The name Posie is consonant, but not identical, with the name of the outstanding jeweler of Swiss origin, Jeremie Pauzier, and in this sense is collective, uniting a whole galaxy of goldsmiths of European origin who worked at the Russian imperial court. There are, indeed, quite a few of them: the Frenchman Jacques Dubolon, the Austrian Leopold Pfisterer, the Swede Karl Eduard Bolin and his heirs, the Huguenot Frenchman Louis-David Duval, who fled to Switzerland, and his son Jacob David, born in Moscow. Carl Faberge, who founded his company in St. Petersburg, was born in the city on the Neva, but his family has European roots. It just so happened that immigrants from Europe became symbols of Russian jewelry art.

From Switzerland to Russia

A native of Geneva, Jeremy Pozier (1716–1776) came to Russia as a 13-year-old teenager – according to legend, he set out on foot with his father and younger brother in search of a better life. It took them a long time to get there, through Holland and Germany. In Hamburg, in order to somehow improve his financial situation, the father was forced to sell his youngest son as an apprentice to a knife sharpener. Jeremy will write about his separation from his beloved brother in his diary. And he outlined his life in Russia in detail in his memoirs “Notes of the court diamond maker Pozier about his stay in Russia (1729–1764).” From them you can find out that Jeremy and his father arrived in St. Petersburg in August 1729. Shortly before his death, his father hired his son as an apprentice in the atelier of the French jeweler Benoit Gravero, where he studied for seven years, mastering the art of cutting stones. Here his talent was noticed by Empress Anna Ioannovna. In 1740, under her patronage, the young man opened his own workshop in St. Petersburg and immediately received the honorary title of court jeweler and chief diamond master.

Jeweler of the Three Empresses

In the next 35 years, Jeremiah (as he was called in St. Petersburg) Pozier was close to the court, serving high society and the aristocracy, creating countless snuff boxes studded with diamonds, brooches, tiaras, and jewelry gifts. Pozier’s career reached its peak during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna. As soon as she ascended the throne in 1742, she ordered all the jewelry of her predecessors to be dismantled into pieces. According to her order in the mid-1750s, the jeweler made a sapphire set with aigrette and cascading earrings and an agraph buckle for fastening an ermine robe. The Hermitage houses elaborate floral brooches from Elizabeth’s collection, made of diamonds, colored precious and semi-precious stones. Pozier not only composed exquisite compositions, but also planted insects on leaves, making vases made of glass and rock crystal as a stand. The jeweler carried out personal assignments for Empress Elizabeth and was close to her until her very last days.

After the death of Elizabeth, Pozier was brought closer to him by her son Peter III and even awarded him the rank of foreman, but strictly forbade him from providing services to his wife, the future Empress Catherine II. That, however, did not prevent the jeweler from establishing a trusting relationship with her. By the way, as a result of the palace coup and the mysterious death of Peter III, Catherine had to pay Pozier for all the jewelry that he supplied to her late husband during the reign from December 1761 to June 1762.

Pozier’s main creation was the large imperial crown, a personal order from Catherine II. This is how the jeweler himself talks about it: “Empress Catherine called me to her place and told me to check the government items, and ordered to break everything that was not in modern taste and use it for a new crown.” In just two months they had to create “the richest thing that exists in Europe.” Pauzier worked with another court jeweler, Georg-Friedrich Eckart, whose design for the coronation crown was more to his liking, and was responsible for the stone inlay. As a result, the crown was decorated with 4936 diamonds, 75 pearls and a magnificent spinel weighing 398.72 carats (until 1922, the red stone was considered a ruby). In this crown, Catherine II ascended the throne on October 3 (September 22, old style) 1762.

Escape to homeland

In 1764, two years after the solemn coronation of Catherine, the jeweler, along with his wife and three daughters, forever left Russia, which had blessed him. He prepared his departure for a long time, trying to receive payment for all completed orders and negotiate with the empress about a “temporary” absence, citing the need to improve his health. “She very graciously answered me that if this trip was necessary to restore my health and if I promised her to return soon, then she would not refuse my request,” Pozier recalls in his memoirs. The Empress did not object and even paid 8 thousand rubles. for her portrait in a frame studded with diamonds, and also wrote an order to Vice-Chancellor Prince A.M. Golitsyn to produce a passport.

Pozier left almost secretly, leaving behind all his craftsmen, clerks and real estate. It took him more than two months to get to Geneva. “As soon as we arrived at the Prussian border, I wrote in diamond on the hotel window: “After thirty years of tears, sorrows and labor, I am going to look for a place where I can rest and pray to the Supreme Being to ease my pain.” The accumulated funds were enough for him and his family to live a comfortable life in Switzerland, where the jeweler quietly and modestly spent the last 12 years of his life.

Nina Spiridonova