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When they hear the name Fabergé, most people immediately think of Imperial Easter Eggs. This is logical because even today the impressive craftsmanship and detailed execution of these objets d’art are the stuff of legends.
Fabergé was founded in 1842 by Gustav Fabergé, but it was his son Peter Carl (1846-1920) who really took the family business to new heights.
Peter Carl Fabergé’s story is European. Born into a Huguenot refugee family in St. Petersburg, Russia, he moved about 14 years later with his family to Dresden, Germany. After extensive studies and travels in central Europe, Fabergé finally returned to the place of his birth as a fully trained craftsman.
It was the year 1870, and Russia was mired in a luxury-hungry tsarist regime. Peter Carl Fabergé took over the Fabergé jewelry store on Bolshaya Morskaya Street in Saint Petersburg that his father Gustav had opened in 1842. And it was here that he instituted a new system of workshop masters to supervise and create objects in the name and style of Faberge.
The 1911 Fabergé Bay Tree Imperial Egg (Photo courtesy of The Forbes Collection)
His workshop masters, all exceptional craftsmen, achieved their own fame over the years and helped Fabergé create a legacy of more than 150,000 objects.
Throughout the century and longer since Fabergé entered the world jewelry scene, he has been best known for two things: translucent enamel on guilloché and Easter eggs, which actually go hand in hand.
Fabergé’s restoration work on objects in the Hermitage Museum’s collection caught the attention of Tsar Alexander III. Along with Fabergé’s work, in 1885 he awarded him the title of “goldsmith with special appointment to the imperial crown.”
How the egg tradition was born
That same year, 1885, Tsar Alexander III also commissioned Fabergé for his first Easter egg as a gift to his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna. This became an annual tradition, with Fabergé creating 50 eggs in total for the Russian court.
The Russian imperial family took very seriously the Easter tradition of giving eggs (a symbol of new life in spring) as gifts.
These eggs were lush showcases of traditional decorative techniques such as gem setting, hand-turned guilloché, and high-heat enamel. At the heart of most of those eggs was a surprise: automatons, miniature paintings and jeweled replicas of places and objects important to the imperial Romanov family.
The 1885 Fabergé chicken egg began the Russian imperial family’s egg tradition (photo courtesy of The Forbes Collection)
Between 1885 and 1916, Fabergé created fifty egg-shaped Easter gifts for the Tsar’s family, most of which were commissioned as surprises. The first imperial egg, a simple chicken egg containing a gold jeweled hen, was, as mentioned above, a gift from Tsar Alexander III to his Danish wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna. And from that point on, the legacy only grew.
The closed 1885 Fabergé chicken egg (photo courtesy of The Forbes Collection)
The chicken egg, now housed in the Fabergé Museum in St. Petersburg, features an opaque white enameled shell. When opened, a matte yellow gold yolk is revealed. The yolk, in turn, contains a chased and enameled gold hen that once held a replica of the Russian imperial crown with a ruby pendant (the Empress’s Easter gift).
Fabergé made ten eggs in the eight years before the death of Tsar Alexander III.
Fabergé’s rosebud egg from 1895 (photo courtesy of The Forbes Collection)
Fabergé’s workshop created another 40 eggs between 1893 and 1916 during the reign of Alexander III’s son, Nicholas II: two appeared each year, one for the mother and the wife.
Another such egg, also at home in the Fabergé Museum in St. Petersburg, is the 1895 Rosebud Egg, which Nicholas II gifted to Empress Alexandra Feodorovna a few months after they were married. Comprised of multi-colored gold, rose-cut diamonds and translucent red enamel on guilloché, the surprise inside is a miniature portrait of the emperor beneath a table-cut diamond.
Other jewelry surprises contained in it have been lost.
While the eggs were unlikely to be very profitable for the jeweler’s business due to the sheer amount of crafts and precious materials that went into them, Fabergé was very proud of them.
Tsarina Feodorovna was in awe of the beautifully crafted Easter eggs and described Fabergé as a genius and as the “greatest artist of the century.”
Fabergé’s coronation egg from 1897 (photo courtesy of The Forbes Collection)
Nicholas II gifted his new wife with the 1897 coronation egg on the day of her coronation at Uspensky Cathedral. The egg design comprised of multi-colored gold, translucent yellow enamel on guilloché, and black double-headed eagles set with diamonds was reminiscent of the radiant fabric of the golden robe she wore that day.
The Little Gold Coach Surprise, an enameled gold miniature replica (only 9.4 centimeters long) of an original 18th century Buckendahl carriage, took 13 months to complete by craftsman Georg Stein. This egg is also in the Fabergé Museum in Saint Petersburg.
Many of the eggs he created for her included surprises related to her personal life such as images of her son and family or, in the case of the 1893 Caucasian egg by master builder Michael Perkhin, a picture of the house where her son, Grand Duke Jorge, spent much of his life being diagnosed with incurable tuberculosis.
The last egg, made in the year of the October Revolution, was called the War Egg.
Forty-two of the original Easter eggs still remain scattered around the world. The rest were stolen during the Russian Revolution.
The mysterious constellation egg
The Russian Revolution ended the tradition of imperial Easter eggs.
The last egg from Fabergé’s historic workshop with Peter Carl Fabergé was the Constellation Egg, which should have been presented to Tsarina Alexandra for Easter 1917.
It featured an engraving of the constellation Leo, alluding to the date of birth of Tsarevich Alexei, heir to the throne. However, shortly before it could be completed, the Russian Revolution broke out. Later, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, the imperial regime fell, the Fabergé family went into exile, and the Constellation Egg disappeared.
Inside the original Fabergé workshop (photo courtesy of Dr. Geza von Habsburg)
The Constellation Egg resurfaced in 1922, albeit only in correspondence between Eugène Fabergé and François Birbaum, Fabergé’s chief designer from 1895 to 1918.
In this letter, Birbaum described the egg as composed of blue glass on a cloud-shaped pedestal of opaque rock crystal.
Traveling at the speed of light, it can take decades for light from a star to reach Earth. The light that came out of the brightest star in the constellation Leo in 1922, when that letter was written, would only have reached Earth in 1999.
And as fate would have it, in 1999 the original drawing of the Constellation Egg came to light, confirming Birbaum’s description. Just two years later, benefiting from the original drawing, the incomplete pieces of the Constellation Egg – the rock crystal clouds and two empty halves of a blue glass egg – were identified in a warehouse at the Fersman Mineralogical Museum in Moscow.
In 1918, Fabergé fled Russia after the Bolsheviks nationalized his business. He settled in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he died on September 24, 1920.
Eggs after 1917
Victor Mayer was a Fabergé builder, the term used for shop supervisor and craftsmen, from 1990 to 2015.
Led by Dr. Marcus O. Mohr, a fourth generation Mayer, Victor Mayer created a new generation of eggs, beginning with the first post-revolutionary egg presented to Mikhail Gorbachev when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, the Egg of the Peace of Gorbachev.
Eggs are the most complicated objects that Victor Mayer made under the Fabergé label (he also made enamel jewelry, watches, and other art objects).
It took nine different trades to complete, and during a tour of the facility in the mid-2000s, Mohr described them to me as the company’s “greatest source of pride.”
A Victor Mayer Fabergé egg with a family of polar bears as a surprise inside
An example makes clear why this is so: one of Victor Mayer’s Fabergé eggs features a winter scene with a family of polar bears when the top of the egg is opened. The “snow” that covers the background of the scene inside the egg is actually rock crystal taken directly from a druse. To find a single piece that is perfect to use as snow, five to ten drusen must be opened and thoroughly examined.
The most complicated mechanical egg ever created by Fabergé was completed in collaboration with master Victor Mayer and master watchmaker Paul Gerber from Zurich: the 2001 moon phase clock egg.
A new continuation
A unique and impressive piece, the 2015 Pearl Egg revived the tradition of imperial eggs under Fabergé’s new owner, Gemfields.
The Fabergé Pearl Egg, 2015
However, instead of being created for Russian royalty, the owner of this latest egg is Hussain Ibrahim Al-Fardan, a man from the family of one of the oldest and most successful pearl traders in the Gulf region (see Egg of Fabergé Pearls: The First Imperial-Class Egg in Nearly 100 Years).
We can only hope to see more of these in the future.
For more information, visit www.faberge.com/news/49_imperial-eggs.
Quick Facts Fabergé Pearl Egg
Surprise pearl: gray, arabic, 12.17 ct
Shell: white and yellow gold with 139 white pearls with golden glitter; 3,305 diamonds; carved rock crystal; mother of pearl
Mechanics: the rotating outer shell at the base opens and closes the six “petals”
Limitation: a single piece
Price: undisclosed figure
* This article was first published on April 14, 2017 in A Brief History Of Fabulous Fabergé Eggs.
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