Like Tronquoy in Paris, Spiegel in St Petersburg looked to the work of early nineteenth-century London goldsmiths for inspiration. A taste for the English style in St Petersburg had been cultivated in the imperial capital by two Englishmen, Charles Nicholls and William Plincke, who, having been previously granted Russian citizenship, and having traded in imported goods, established the firm Messrs Nicholls & Plincke’s Magasin Anglais in 1829. During the Crimean War the words ‘Magasin Anglais’ were dropped expediently from the firm’s name. Alexander Pushkin in his verse novel Eugene Onegin, first published in 1833, used the elegant connotations of the English style in his pen portrait of the worldly eponymous hero: ‘He dressed like a London dandy, Hair à la mode, divinely curled.’

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