Some time around 2004, a scrap-metal dealer in the American Midwest paid about $14,000 at a bric-a-brac market for a small golden egg on a jewelled stand, containing a lady's watch by Vacheron Constantin. His plan was simple: melt it, sell the gold, pocket a modest profit. But he had overpaid — the metal was worth less than he'd spent — and the egg sat in his kitchen for years while he brooded. In 2012 he typed "egg" and "Vacheron Constantin" into Google and found a newspaper article about a lost imperial Fabergé egg. He flew to London with photographs, walked into Wartski, the royal jewellers, and was told by their expert Kieran McCarthy that he owned the Third Imperial Egg of 1887, made for Tsar Alexander III — an object that sold in 2014, discreetly and reportedly for around $33 million. The scrap man had come within a blowtorch of destroying it.
The story he stumbled into began at Easter 1885, when Alexander III gave his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna, a deceptively plain white enamelled egg. It opened to reveal a golden yolk, inside which sat a golden hen, inside which — in the manner of a Russian doll — nestled a diamond replica of the imperial crown and a ruby pendant. The idea likely nodded to an ivory egg in the Danish royal collection that Maria had known as a princess. The Hen Egg delighted the empress, and its maker, the St Petersburg goldsmith Peter Carl Fabergé, received a standing commission: an egg every Easter, with two rules only — egg-shaped, and containing a surprise. (The Hen Egg survives; its innermost crown and ruby pendant are lost, an omen in miniature.) After Alexander's death, Nicholas II doubled the order, presenting one egg to his mother and one to his wife, Empress Alexandra, each year. Fifty imperial eggs were delivered between 1885 and 1916; the two intended for Easter 1917 were overtaken by revolution and never handed over.
The workshop of wonders
The eggs, executed by Fabergé's chief workmasters Michael Perchin and then Henrik Wigström, were exercises not in gem-flaunting but in invention: the Coronation Egg of 1897 concealed a perfect miniature of the imperial coach that took months of labour; the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg of 1900 held a wind-up gold train; others hid mechanical swans, miniature palaces and portrait galleries. The House of Fabergé grew to employ some 500 craftsmen, and the eggs became the supreme status objects of Europe's last gilded age — right up until the age ended. In 1918 the Bolsheviks nationalised the firm and shot Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra in a Yekaterinburg cellar (the eggs' other recipient, the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna, escaped Russia in 1919 and died in Denmark); Carl Fabergé fled Russia and died in Switzerland in 1920, of what his family called a broken heart.
The eggs were crated into the Kremlin Armoury, and in the late 1920s and 1930s Stalin's government, hungry for hard currency, quietly sold more than a dozen abroad through its Antikvariat agency — sometimes for startlingly small sums. Buyers included the American oil magnate Armand Hammer and the London dealers Wartski, threading the eggs into Western collections. Malcolm Forbes, the magazine tycoon, amassed nine imperial eggs; in 2004 his heirs' entire collection was bought before auction, for a figure reported around $100 million, by the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who shipped the eggs home and opened the Fabergé Museum in St Petersburg's Shuvalov Palace in 2013. The British Royal Collection keeps three imperial eggs; the Kremlin Armoury retains ten. Collectors also chase the non-imperial commissions — the seven eggs Fabergé made for the gold magnate Alexander Kelch chief among them — which quizmasters delight in confusing with the tsars' fifty.
Still out there
Of the fifty imperial eggs, the whereabouts of forty-three are known. Seven remain lost — last glimpsed in old inventories, revolutionary manifests and pre-war photographs — and the Third Imperial's kitchen-counter resurrection proved that "lost" can mean "unrecognised on somebody's shelf". That possibility is now part of the legend: somewhere, conceivably, a flea-market trinket with a stiff hinge is waiting to be googled. The Romanovs are gone, the empire is gone, the firm was gone within three years of the last delivery; the eggs, uselessly, exquisitely, survive — history's most valuable Easter presents, still not all accounted for.
Quiz nuggets
- The first imperial egg, the Hen Egg, was given by Alexander III to Empress Maria Feodorovna at Easter 1885.
- Fifty imperial eggs were delivered up to 1916; Nicholas II gave two a year — to his mother and his wife; the 1917 pair was never delivered.
- Carl Fabergé fled the revolution and died in Switzerland in 1920; Stalin later sold eggs abroad for hard currency.
- The Third Imperial Egg (1887) resurfaced around 2012 via a US scrap dealer who had paid about $14,000; Wartski handled its ~$33m sale in 2014.
- Forbes's nine imperial eggs went to Viktor Vekselberg in 2004 (~$100m); seven imperial eggs are still lost.