Fabergé Eggs

Podcast Transcript

In 1885, the Russian Tsar Alexander III commissioned an Easter gift for his wife.

It was a rather unusual gift. He asked one of the finest goldsmiths in the country to create a jeweled egg.

However, it wasn’t just to be an expensive bauble. Inside the egg was to be another exquisite surprise.

This began a tradition that would last for over 30 years and resulted in some of the finest and most valuable decorative works of art in the world.

Learn about Fabergé Eggs, their creation, and the stories behind them on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

If you aren’t familiar with Fabergé Eggs, I encourage you to look at images of some of the eggs online. Of the 69 eggs that were believed to have been created, it is estimated that 43 survive today. Each egg is a unique, exquisite, expertly crafted work of art.

The story of how and why these eggs were created doesn’t begin in Russia; it actually begins in France.

The Fabergé family, as you might suspect from the name, isn’t Russian. In fact, their name wasn’t even Fabergé.

The original name of the family was Favri. They were French Protestant Huguenots in a very Catholic country.

In 1685, King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted religious tolerance to Protestants. This revocation triggered a wave of persecution, forcing hundreds of thousands of Huguenots to flee the country to avoid forced conversion, imprisonment, or death.

Among the émigrés were members of the Favri family, who left France and eventually settled in the Baltic region, then under Swedish control. Over the generations, the family moved eastward into the Russian Empire, establishing itself in what is now Estonia.

As they moved, they gradually changed their family name. Favri became Favry, Fabri, and eventually became Faberge, spelled the same but without the accent on the last e.

By the early 19th century, Gustav Faberge had relocated to St. Petersburg, the imperial capital of Russia, where he trained as a goldsmith in the German tradition, making gold boxes.

In 1842, he ended his apprenticeship and opened his own goldsmithing and jewelry business. He named his business Fabergé, with a diacritical mark over the e to make it appear more French. He also changed it to the family name one last time.

This was a strategic decision on his part because, at the time, the Russian royal family and nobility were infatuated with all things French, to the extent that it became the language used at court.

Russian aristocrats associated French goods with luxury and quality.

Fast-forward a little over 40 years to 1885. House of Fabergé was successful, and it had been taken over by Gustav’s son, Peter Carl Fabergé.

That year, Tsar Alexander III commissioned Fabergé to create an Easter gift for his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna.

The tsar wasn’t interested in buying a pretty bauble from a shop.

In the Russian Orthodox tradition, Easter holds profound religious significance, and the exchange of eggs symbolizes rebirth and renewal.

Drawing on the Russian Orthodox tradition of exchanging decorated eggs during Easter and inspired by a jeweled egg owned by the empress’s Danish family, the tsar wanted a gift that would be both sentimental and extraordinary.

The tsar didn’t just want an egg. The egg was also to contain a surprise for the tsarina.

The resulting creation was deceptively simple in appearance. It was a white enamel egg that opened to reveal a golden yolk, which in turn held a gold hen and a miniature replica of the imperial crown.

This first Fabergé egg has been called the First Hen Egg and it is currently on display at the Fabergé Museum in Saint Petersburg.

The Empress was so delighted with the gift that Alexander III appointed Fabergé as the official court jeweler. Moreover, he placed a standing order with the House of Fabergé, requiring them to create an egg for the tsar every year.

The only requirements were that each egg must be unique and contain a surprise. This gave Fabergé extraordinary creative freedom while ensuring that each creation would be unlike any other.

It should be noted that Peter Carl probably didn’t actually work on the egg or any of the future eggs himself. The first eggs were likely created by a Finnish jeweler named Erik August Kollin, who was an employee of his.

What Peter Carl realized was that he wasn’t just making fine jeweled items for the tsar. He was crafting symbols of imperial power, artistic achievement, and personal devotion.

These were signature items that would not just gain him favor with the tsar but would establish a reputation for him and his company throughout the Russian nobility and the rest of Europe.

When Alexander III died in 1894, his son Nicholas II continued the tradition but with a significant expansion. The new Tsar commissioned two eggs each year, one for his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, and one for his wife, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. This meant that from 1895 until the revolution in 1917, Fabergé’s workshop was creating these masterpieces at an unprecedented pace.

The creation of each egg was an extraordinarily complex process that could take an entire year. Fabergé employed master craftsmen who specialized in different aspects of the work. Some were experts in enameling, others in goldsmithing, still others in gem cutting and setting.

The workshop operated more like a Renaissance artist’s studio, with Fabergé himself serving as the creative director while skilled artisans executed his vision. Each egg required hundreds of hours of meticulous work, incorporating techniques that had been refined over the course of centuries.

The eggs themselves varied dramatically in style and concept. Some celebrated military victories, like the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg, which contained a working model of the famous train. Others marked personal milestones, such as the Coronation Egg, which commemorated Nicholas II’s coronation and contained a miniature replica of the imperial coach.

The craftsmen incorporated precious metals, gemstones, enamel, and even more exotic materials like bowenite and nephrite jade.

What made these objects truly remarkable wasn’t just their material value, though that was considerable. Each egg was a miniature masterpiece of engineering and artistry.

The mechanisms that operated the surprises were often as complex as fine clockwork. The Imperial Coronation Egg, for instance, contains a mechanism that allows the miniature coach to be wound up and actually driven across a surface, complete with moving wheels and a swaying suspension.

The total number of Imperial Easter eggs created by Fabergé for the tsars is definitively established at fifty. This count spans from 1885 to 1916.

It’s worth noting that while these fifty Imperial eggs are the most famous, Fabergé also created eggs for other wealthy clients, including the Kelch family.

The total number of all eggs made by Fabergé is believed to have been 69.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought an abrupt end to the Romanov dynasty and the production of imperial eggs. The Bolsheviks nationalized the Fabergé workshop (because every communist country needs a high-end jewelry company), and many eggs were confiscated and stored in the Kremlin Armoury.

Carl Peter Fabergé fled to Riga, Latvia, where he found himself in the middle of a war between Latvia and the Soviet Union, which caused him to flee again to Germany and eventually Switzerland, where he died in 1920.

His sons, Agathon and Alexander, were imprisoned by the Soviets. His wife and son, Eugene, managed to cross into Finland in the middle of the night. Agathon and Alexander both eventually escaped from prison.

Alexander and Eugene eventually opened a jewelry store in Paris.

I should note that the Fabergé fragrance and cosmetics company, which is the brand name you’ve probably heard of, has nothing directly to do with the Fabergé family of egg fame.

The fragrance company was founded by a Polish entrepreneur named Samuel Rubin, who named the company after the Fabergé jewelry company at the suggestion of his friend, and collector of Fabergé eggs, the American oil tycoon Armand Hammer.

Hammer worked closely with the Soviet government as he was one of the few Westerners who were trusted enough to do business with.

But what happened to the eggs?

In the 1920s and 1930s, Stalin’s government began systematically selling off Imperial treasures through various channels. Some eggs were sold through official Soviet trade organizations, others through intermediaries and dealers.

This process scattered the collection across the globe, with eggs ending up in private collections, museums, and even some remaining in Soviet hands for decades.

Armand Hammer was given three eggs by the Soviets.

Today, the fifty Imperial eggs are distributed across several locations. The largest single collection resides in Russia, where nine eggs are housed in the Kremlin Armory Museum in Moscow.

These eggs were either never sold by the Soviet government or were later repatriated. The collection there includes some of the most spectacular examples, such as the Moscow Kremlin Egg and the Memory of Azov Egg.

The United States holds a significant portion of the collection, with several eggs in private hands and others in museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts each house Imperial eggs.

Private collectors in America also own several eggs, though these occasionally change hands through high-profile auction sales.

Of the eggs that went missing, no one is really sure what happened to them. We have records and, in some cases, drawings of the missing eggs.

In one famous case, a lost Fabergé egg, the Third Imperial Egg, was discovered in an unlikely place.

For decades, the egg was considered lost, its whereabouts unknown. It had last been listed in a 1964 auction catalog in New York, listed merely as a “gold watch in egg form,” with no mention of Fabergé or its imperial provenance.

From there, it vanished into obscurity.

Sometime in the early 2000s, a scrap metal dealer in the American Midwest bought the egg at an estate sale for around $13,000, thinking he could make a small profit by selling it for its gold content.

He was particularly interested in the Vacheron Constantin watch inside, which was made of solid gold. However, when he weighed the egg and calculated the gold value, he realized that the piece wasn’t worth much more than he had paid, and he considered melting it down for scrap.

Before doing so, he searched online for clues about the strange item. When he Googled the names engraved on the watch inside, he stumbled upon a 2011 article in The Telegraph, a British newspaper.

The article included a photo of the lost Third Imperial Egg and provided a detailed description of its appearance. He immediately recognized it as the same object he had purchased.

Realizing its possible value, he contacted Kieran McCarthy, a Fabergé expert at the London jeweler Wartski. In 2012, he traveled to London with photos of the egg, and Wartski quickly confirmed its authenticity.

In early 2014, the egg was physically brought to London for formal authentication. It was confirmed to be the Third Imperial Egg, made in 1887 and last recorded in public view around 1914. It was then sold privately for an undisclosed amount.

Estimates place its value at around $33 million dollars.

There are very few Fabergé eggs that ever come to auction. In 2004, the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg purchased nine Fabergé eggs from the collection of American publisher Malcolm Forbes for about $100 million.

Given the rise in art prices this century, the next time a Fabergé egg goes up for auction, it could shatter all records.

The hunt for the remaining missing eggs continues to fascinate collectors and historians. The discovery of a lost egg would not only represent an enormous financial find but also return a piece of Russian cultural heritage to the world.

The enduring fascination with Fabergé eggs extends far beyond their material value or historical significance. They represent a pinnacle of the merger of combining technical mastery and engineering with artistic vision in ways that have rarely been equaled before or since.