I had the opportunity to get a private tour of the Amber Workshop, where the same amber masters who reconstructed the Amber Room continue to create amber artwork for the museum shop.
The original Amber Room was acquired by Peter the Great in 1716. Catherine the Great later commissioned a new generation of craftsmen to embellish the room and moved it from the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to the Catherine Palace. During WWII, the Amber Room was dismantled and removed from Russia by the Germans, after which it disappeared never to be found again (except for one mosaic). The reconstruction of the Amber Room had been in progress for over 20 years, and the room was finally completed only a couple of years ago: in 2003.
The Amber Workshop is located in one of the smaller buildings adjacent to the main palace. The pieces created there are sold at the museum’s Art Shop at high prices, mostly to western tourists.
Reconstruction of the Amber Room was an obviously painstaking and meticulous process performed by only six amber masters, who used pre-WWII black and white photos, as well as watercolors, to recreate as closely as possibly the mosaics and frames lost in the mid-20th century.
Above: black and white photos used to recreate the amber designs.
Amber is made of ancient petrified tree sap that has been under seawater for thousands of years. Because unlike regular stones it is of organic nature, amber is a lot more fragile and only lasts a couple of hundred years. Amber from the original Amber Room was obtained from Krasnodar, a city in the Baltic that was originally part of Prussia. The amber for the current room is from the same region. Selected areas of the sea are drained in order to harvest the amber. Amber is relatively soft and special tools are needed to cut and process it.
Below: amber cutter and amber polisher:
Most common amber is pale yellow and in order to match all the hues to the Amber Room originals, various dyes were used.
Above: A pile of unprocessed amber, and dyes used to match the colors.
Below: Mosaics were reproduced from the photos of the originals, using various pieces, much like a puzzle.
The frames have a wooden base; processed amber pieces are glued onto the wood with special resin (below).
Above: A completed mosaic and its amber frame.
Below: Nastya - the Amber Workshop mascot.
Read more about the Amber Room reconstruction
View artwork and jewerly created by one of the six Amber Shop artisans
