The Rothschild Faberge Egg

A gold and rose-pink enamel egg of 1902, made by the House of Faberge under workmaster Michael Perkhin, that opens on the hour to release a diamond-set cockerel which flaps, nods, crows and retracts before a concealed clock strikes the bell. It was never an Imperial commission: Beatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild ordered it as an engagement gift for Germaine Halphen, who married Beatrice's brother Baron Edouard de Rothschild in 1905, and it stayed in that family for a century.

Christie's London sold it on 28 November 2007 for a combined 8,980,500 pounds, a record at the time for any Russian work of art, any Faberge object and any timepiece at auction. The buyer, the Russian collector Alexander Ivanov, later gave it to President Vladimir Putin, who presented it to the State Hermitage Museum in December 2014 as a 250th-anniversary gift. A British and German tax investigation into the VAT treatment of Ivanov's purchase had raided his Baden-Baden museum about a week before that presentation.

It is routinely confused with a different object, the 1904 Kelch Chanticleer egg, which shares the same cockerel-and-clock mechanism, the same workshop and a near-identical date, but was made two years later for an entirely different family. The two eggs are not the same object and this record treats them as such.

What it is

The egg stands about 27 centimetres on a circular base, worked in gold under a translucent rose-pink enamel laid over an engine-turned, or guilloche, ground, the technique most associated with the House of Faberge. A trellis of rose-cut diamonds and oriental pearls is applied over the shell, gathered into diamond-set garlands at the equator, in the late Louis XVI revival taste that Faberge's workshops used repeatedly for European and aristocratic clients outside the Imperial family.

It is, in effect, a very expensive clock built into the form of an Easter egg. The lower body houses a clockwork movement that runs continuously; the upper section is the mechanism's stage.

The mechanism

On the hour, the top of the egg opens and a diamond-set cockerel rises into view. It flaps its enamelled wings four times, nods its head three times while opening and closing its beak, and crows, in a routine that runs about fifteen seconds, before retracting and letting the clock strike the hour on a bell. It is one of only a small number of Faberge eggs built around a full clock-and-automaton combination, a category that includes the 1900 Cockerel egg made for the Imperial family and the 1904 Kelch Chanticleer egg made for a different private client; the mechanical design of the surprise, described in the sources consulted, is essentially the same across the group, which is precisely why the three eggs are so often mixed up.

The workshop that made it

The piece is hallmarked to Michael Perkhin, who became head workmaster of the House of Faberge in 1886 and held that position, overseeing the firm's most artistically ambitious commissions including a number of the Imperial Easter eggs, until his death in 1903. A workmaster's mark identifies the atelier responsible, not a single craftsman's hand; an object of this complexity would have passed through several specialist hands, including an enameller, a lapidary for the diamonds and pearls, and a clockmaker for the movement, all working under Perkhin's supervision and Faberge's name.

The 1902 commission, and what it was not

The egg was not made for the Russian Imperial family, and it is not one of the fifty-two Imperial Easter eggs Faberge produced for Alexander III and Nicholas II. It was commissioned by Beatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild, a member of the Rothschild banking family, as an engagement present for Germaine Halphen, who was marrying Beatrice's younger brother, Baron Edouard Alphonse James de Rothschild. Halphen and Rothschild married in 1905, and the egg is dated to the year of the engagement, 1902.

This places it in a small category of non-Imperial Faberge eggs commissioned by private clients of comparable wealth and standing to the Romanovs, a group that includes the seven eggs made for the Russian industrialist Alexander Kelch and his wife Barbara Kelch-Bazanova between 1898 and 1904, and the Duchess of Marlborough egg of the same year, 1902, commissioned by an American client. The Rothschild egg belongs with these, not with the Imperial series, and none of the sources consulted for this record documents any Romanov involvement in its commission, gift or ownership.

The object it is not: the Kelch Chanticleer egg

The Rothschild egg is regularly confused with, and sometimes wrongly called, the Kelch Chanticleer egg, and the confusion is understandable rather than careless. Both are Faberge clock eggs with a diamond-set cockerel automaton built to the same fifteen-second routine of wing-flaps, head-nods and crowing before the hour strikes. Both were made in Perkhin's workshop within two years of each other, in a shared late-nineteenth-century taste for automaton clocks. But they are different objects, made for different clients, and they have different modern histories: the Chanticleer egg was made in 1904 for Alexander Kelch, who gave it to his wife Barbara Kelch-Bazanova, and it is today in the Faberge Museum in Saint Petersburg, part of Viktor Vekselberg's collection, not the State Hermitage. This record covers the Rothschild egg alone and does not draw on facts specific to the Kelch Chanticleer egg to fill any gap in this one.

The twentieth century: a documented family, an undocumented chain

The sources consulted agree that the egg remained with the Halphen-Rothschild family for roughly a century after 1902, one press account at the time of the 2007 sale describing it as having been in the same family for a hundred years, sold by descendants of Germaine Halphen and Edouard de Rothschild. None of the sources consulted, however, names the individual family members who held it between Germaine Halphen's death and the 2007 sale, or gives dates for when it passed between them. It was first shown to the public at a Christie's exhibition in Moscow in October 2007, ahead of the London sale the following month, which suggests the piece had had little or no public exposure in the preceding decades.

The 2007 Christie's sale

Christie's London offered the egg on 28 November 2007 with a pre-sale estimate reported at 6,000,000 to 9,000,000 pounds. One source, the Mieks Faberge Eggs sale page, gives a hammer price of 8,000,000 pounds (reported as roughly 16.5 million US dollars) and a total of 8,980,500 pounds once the buyer's premium is added (reported as roughly 18.5 million US dollars, or 12.5 million euros). Most of the other sources consulted report only the combined figure of 8,980,500 pounds and describe it explicitly as inclusive of commission; none of the sources consulted labels 8,980,500 pounds as a hammer price.

The sale set three simultaneous auction records at the time: the highest price paid for any Russian work of art, for any Faberge object, and for any timepiece, surpassing the 9.6 million dollar sale of the Faberge Winter egg in 2002. The buyer was Alexander Ivanov, a Russian collector and the founder, in 1993, of Russia's first private museum; he stated at the time that the egg would go into a private museum he was building in Moscow and would not be resold. The sources consulted describe the egg as sold with full provenance documentation and an export licence, which indicates the transaction was legally unremarkable at the point of sale; none of the sources found for this record documents a UK Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art case, a temporary export bar, or a deadline for a British institution to match the price for this specific object, despite a direct search for one. That absence is recorded in the open questions below rather than assumed to mean no such process occurred.

The VAT dispute and the 2014 raid

When Ivanov bought the egg, he arranged for it to be shipped directly to Russia, which under EU rules exempted the purchase from value-added tax, and he claimed a VAT refund reported at approximately 600,000 pounds on that basis. British investigators later came to suspect the egg had in fact been routed through Germany rather than sent directly to Russia, which would have invalidated the exemption.

On 1 December 2014, around forty British law-enforcement officers, supported by Germany's Financial Investigation and Customs Department, raided Ivanov's Faberge Museum in Baden-Baden, Germany, together with the private home and vehicle of the museum's director, Sergei Avtonoshkin. The investigation, run by the UK's HM Revenue and Customs, concerned an alleged total of nearly 70,000 pounds in unpaid VAT across purchases made at London auction houses over roughly fifteen years, not only the Rothschild egg. Avtonoshkin told investigators the egg had been loaned briefly to Baden-Baden for an exhibition and then returned to Moscow. The museum denied wrongdoing and said nothing incriminating was found in the raid; Ivanov characterised the raid as politically motivated, timed to disrupt the gift to the Hermitage a week later. None of the sources consulted for this record reports a final legal resolution of the VAT investigation.

The gift to the Hermitage

On 8 December 2014, at a reception marking the State Hermitage Museum's 250th anniversary, President Vladimir Putin presented the museum with two Faberge-related objects, a nineteenth-century clock made for the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of Emperor Alexander III and Empress Maria Feodorovna, and the Rothschild egg. Putin is reported as saying, of the gifts, that he and his colleagues had not come empty-handed. The Hermitage's own credit line for the object, as reported, reads: gift of the President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin, through the donor A.N. Ivanov. That phrasing, naming Ivanov as the donor acting through Putin's presentation, is the clearest documentation available of how ownership passed from a private Russian collector to a Russian state museum, and it reads as a completed gift rather than a loan.

This matters because the only confirmed free-licence photographs of the egg were taken at the Hermitage's General Staff Building, and it would be easy to read those photographs as documenting only a temporary loan exhibition of the kind museums stage constantly. The documentation available instead describes a permanent transfer of ownership completed in December 2014, with the object subsequently on ordinary long-term display, last confirmed in Room 302 of the General Staff Building as of January 2019. No source consulted documents the egg leaving the Hermitage since.

What the cockerel does not mean

Faberge did make one egg with an explicit Easter theme, the 1894 Resurrection egg showing Christ rising from the tomb, made by Perkhin for Maria Feodorovna. This egg is not that kind of object, and none of the sources consulted attaches an Easter or resurrection reading to its cockerel. It was not an Easter gift; it was an engagement gift, commissioned for a specific event in a private family's calendar rather than for the religious occasion the Faberge egg form nominally references. The cockerel automaton belongs to a European tradition of clockwork animal automata built into decorative clocks, and its most obvious function here is theatrical: a bird that performs on the hour is a display of the workshop's mechanical virtuosity and of the value the object represents, in the same spirit as Faberge's own remark that expensive materials interested him little next to the ingenuity of the making. Where a clearer symbolic or devotional programme exists for other Faberge eggs, this record has looked for one here and found none in the sources consulted; that absence is itself the honest finding, not a gap to be filled with speculation.

What is still unresolved

The chain of individual ownership within the Rothschild family between 1905 and 2007 is undocumented in every source consulted. Whether any UK export control process was triggered by the sale, and if so what the outcome was, could not be confirmed despite a direct search; the sale is instead reported as having proceeded with an export licence already in place. The outcome of the 2014 VAT investigation into Ivanov's museum has not been reported in any source found. And the egg's status since its last confirmed sighting in January 2019, whether it remains on permanent display, has moved within the Hermitage, or has travelled elsewhere on loan, is not addressed in any source consulted for this record.