Third Imperial Easter Egg

A gold Easter egg 8.2 centimetres high, delivered by the House of Faberge to Tsar Alexander III for 2,160 roubles and given to Empress Maria Feodorovna at Easter 1887. It opens to a lady's watch by Vacheron and Constantin. It was photographed once, in a vitrine at the von Dervis mansion in Saint Petersburg in March 1902, and then vanished into the Soviet liquidation of the Romanov treasure.

It surfaced in New York in March 1964 as lot 259 at Parke-Bernet, catalogued as a gold watch in an egg-form case, with no mention of Faberge and no mention of the Russian imperial family, and sold for 2,450 US dollars. Four decades later a scrap metal dealer in the American Midwest bought it at an antiques stall for its melt value, could not find anyone willing to buy the gold at his price, and kept it at home for years. In 2012 he searched the internet for the two words he could read on it, egg and Vacheron Constantin, and found a newspaper article about a lost Faberge egg.

The identification is secure and heavily documented. The money is not. The 1964 price of 2,450 dollars is a matter of public record; the sum the dealer paid is given variously as 13,000, 13,302 and 14,000 dollars; and the figure of about 33 million dollars attached to the 2014 sale is a press estimate of a private transaction that Wartski has never confirmed. This record separates the three.

A watch that a tsar turned into an Easter egg

The object is small. It stands 8.2 centimetres high, which the 1964 auction cataloguer measured as 3 1/4 inches, and most of that height is stand rather than egg. The egg itself is a reeded gold case, ridged like a fluted column turned on its axis, with a large old-mine diamond of about seventy-five points set into the front as the clasp. Press the diamond and the case opens.

Inside is a lady's watch by Vacheron and Constantin, with a white enamel dial and openwork gold hands set with diamonds. The watch is hinged so that it stands upright once the case is open. That is the whole surprise. There is no automaton, no miniature carriage, no portrait train of the kind Faberge built into the later eggs. In 1887 the tradition was two years old and still modest.

The stand does the display work. It is a three-colour gold tripod: an annulus bordered with wave scrolling, carried on paired corbel-like legs that end in lion paws joined by a ring stretcher. Three cabochon sapphires sit in medallions on the annulus, each capped by a small bow of rose-cut diamonds, and from each bow hang swags of gold roses and leaves worked in three tones of gold. Wartski records that one of the diamond bows is now missing.

The gift, and what it cost

Alexander III began the tradition in 1885 with the Hen Egg, a plain white enamelled shell that opened to a gold yolk, a gold hen, a replica of the imperial crown and a ruby pendant. Empress Maria Feodorovna, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark, was delighted by it, and the firm was granted the title of Supplier to the Imperial Court on 1 May 1885. From then until 1917 an egg was delivered every Easter, one a year under Alexander III and two a year under Nicholas II.

This is the third of them. The Imperial Cabinet account books record the payment on 18 May 1887: an Easter egg with clock, decorated with diamonds, sapphires and rose-cut diamonds, 2,160 roubles. That entry is the birth certificate of the object, and it is one of the four documents that eventually put a name back on it.

The egg went to the Empress at the Anichkov Palace in Saint Petersburg, where she kept her Faberge. It stayed with her for thirty years.

One photograph, taken in 1902

In March 1902, shortly before Easter, the Faberge holdings of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna and of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna were put on public view at the von Dervis mansion in Saint Petersburg. The eggs were arranged in glass vitrines and photographed, in at least one case by the Saint Petersburg photographer K. K. Bulla.

That photograph is the only image of this egg made between 1887 and 1964, and it is the reason the object could be recovered at all. Four of the eight eggs missing at the start of this century were known only from written descriptions, with no picture of any kind. This one had a picture, buried in a group shot of a shelf of eggs, and nobody knew which shape on the shelf it was until 2011.

After March 1902 the egg was not seen in public again under its own name for one hundred and twelve years.

How it left Russia

In September 1917 the contents of the Anichkov Palace were moved to the Moscow Kremlin Armoury. The egg appears in the Soviet inventory as Article 1548, described without a maker's name: a lady's gold watch, opened and set into a gold egg with one diamond, the latter on a gold tripod pedestal with three sapphires. In February or March 1922 it was handed to Ivan Gavrilovich Chinariov, a Special Plenipotentiary, with a note reading one gold egg with watch, diamond push-piece and pedestal with three sapphires and rose-cut diamonds. In May 1924 it was among eighteen eggs valued for sale, a fact recorded in the Goznak archive.

Then the record stops. Between 1930 and 1933 fourteen Imperial eggs were sold out of Russia by Stalin's commissars, chiefly to the American dealer Armand Hammer and to Emanuel Snowman of Wartski in London. Kieran McCarthy of Wartski has suggested that Hammer is the likeliest route by which this egg reached the United States. That is a reasonable inference from Hammer's role and from where the egg turned up. It is not evidence, and no document has been produced connecting Hammer to this object.

There is a sharp irony in the two names. Wartski, which bought Romanov eggs from the Soviet government in the 1930s, is the firm that identified this one in 2014. Hammer, the other buyer, was later shown to have been given Faberge hallmarking tools by the Soviet trade authorities and to have stamped the firm's marks onto unsigned Russian objects for sale in his New York and Palm Beach galleries. The man most likely to have exported the egg is also one of the men most responsible for the fact that a Faberge mark proves nothing.

Lot 259

On 7 March 1964, at Parke-Bernet Galleries on Madison Avenue in New York, the egg came up as lot 259 in a sale of the chattels of Mrs Rena Clark. The catalogue entry runs, with the accents stripped for this record:

Gold Watch in Egg-Form Case on Wrought Three-Tone Gold Stand, Set with Jewels. Fourteen-karat gold watch in reeded egg-shaped case with seventy-five point old-mine diamond clasp by Vacheron and Constantin; on eighteen-karat three-tone gold stand exquisitely wrought with an annulus, bordered with wave scrollings and pairs of corbel-like legs cisele with a capping of roses, pendants of tiny leaves depending to animalistic feet with ring stretcher; the annulus bears three medallions of cabochon sapphires surmounted by tiny bowknotted ribbons set with minute diamonds, which support very finely cisele three-tone gold swags of roses and leaves which continue downward and over the pairs of legs. Height 3 1/4 inches.

Read it again and notice what is not in it. There is no Faberge. There is no Russia, no Romanov, no imperial anything. The only maker named is the Swiss watch firm. The cataloguing is not lazy: it is minutely observed, correct in every physical particular, and it is exactly the description that made the object findable half a century later. What was missing was not the eye but the provenance.

It sold for 2,450 US dollars, reported at the time as 875 pounds sterling, a conversion consistent with the fixed rate of about 2.80 dollars to the pound then in force. That is the only price in this record that is a matter of public auction record.

Bought to be melted

The buyer at Parke-Bernet has never been named. Accounts describe her as a Southern lady. She died in the early 2000s, her estate was dispersed, and the egg made its way to an antiques stall in the American Midwest, still carrying no attribution of any kind.

A scrap metal dealer bought it there. He was not buying an Easter egg; he was buying gold, sapphires and diamonds by weight, and he paid what he calculated the materials were worth. The prospective buyers he then approached tested the metal, decided he had overpaid, and would not take it at his price. He refused to sell at a loss. The egg went home with him and stayed on a kitchen counter for years. It still carries the scratches where those buyers scraped the surface to assay the gold.

In 2012 he tried again, this time by searching the internet for the only two things he could read on the object: the word egg, and the name Vacheron Constantin. The search returned a Daily Telegraph article of 13 August 2011 by Roya Nikkhah, headlined Is this 20 million pound nest-egg on your mantelpiece?, which reproduced the 1964 auction photograph and quoted Kieran McCarthy of Wartski. He recognised his own object in the picture.

How it was identified

The identification was made in two stages, by researchers rather than by the trade, and it was made before anybody knew the egg still existed.

The first stage was subtraction. In November 2008 the independent researcher Annemiek Wintraecken argued that the Blue Serpent Clock Egg, then in the collection of the Prince of Monaco and assigned by most scholarship to 1887, in fact answered to the Faberge invoice of 1895. Removing it from the 1887 slot left that year empty and created a new missing egg, described in the archives but never pictured.

The second stage was matching. On 6 July 2011 the Faberge researchers Vincent and Anna Palmade found, in a catalogue for a 1964 Parke-Bernet sale, a photograph of an object that matched a shape in the 1902 von Dervis vitrine photograph. Their case rested on four legs: the visual match between the 1964 and 1902 photographs; the fit with the Imperial Cabinet account entry and the 1922 Soviet inventory; the stylistic consistency of the reeded gold and three-colour swags with Faberge work of the mid-1880s; and the chronological gap Wintraecken had opened three years earlier. That discovery is what produced the Telegraph article, and the Telegraph article is what the scrap dealer found.

McCarthy flew to the Midwest to see it. His account, given to the Telegraph and widely reproduced, is worth keeping as evidence of how a discovery of this kind actually happens: a modest house next to a highway and a Dunkin' Donuts, and the egg standing on the kitchen counter next to some cupcakes. The owner etched McCarthy's name and the date into the wooden bar stool the dealer had sat on to examine it.

What the price actually is

Four sums attach to this object and only two of them are established.

Established. 2,160 roubles, paid by the Imperial Cabinet to Faberge in May 1887 and entered in the account books. 2,450 US dollars, the price at Parke-Bernet on 7 March 1964. No source consulted separates a hammer figure from a premium on the 1964 sale, and the single figure is reported as the price paid.

Disputed. What the scrap dealer paid. The figure is given as 14,000 dollars by the general press, as 13,302 dollars by the specialist Faberge literature, and as 13,000 dollars by CNN. The precision of 13,302 suggests a calculated melt value rather than a round negotiation, and it is the figure the Faberge Research Site carries. The year is also unsettled: accounts give around 2004, and others imply a purchase closer to 2011.

Reported, not established. The figure of about 33 million US dollars for the 2014 sale. This was a private treaty transaction arranged by Wartski, who bought the egg from the dealer and sold it on to a collector. The sum was not disclosed by either party. The 33 million figure comes from press reporting, principally CNN in 2015; the 2011 Telegraph article had used an estimate of 20 million pounds; the Faberge Research Site records market observers estimating around 20 million pounds for the sale itself. A private sale generates no public record, no auction result, and no third-party verification. It should not be cited as a price.

For scale against something that is a public record: the Rothschild Egg, a non-Imperial Faberge egg, sold at Christie's London on 28 November 2007 for about 8.9 million pounds including commission, then a record for any Faberge object, any Russian object and any timepiece at auction. And in 2004 Victor Vekselberg bought nine Imperial eggs together from the Forbes estate for a reported 100 million dollars, also a private transaction.

Where it is now, and what is still missing

Wartski exhibited the egg at 14 Grafton Street in Mayfair from 14 to 17 April 2014, free to the public, one hundred and twelve years after it was last shown. It then went to its buyer, who has not been named. In 2021 that owner lent it to the Victoria and Albert Museum for Faberge in London: Romance to Revolution, 20 November 2021 to 8 May 2022, where it was labelled as by Faberge, workmaster August Holmstrom. That is the only public appearance recorded since the Wartski show.

Faberge delivered fifty Imperial eggs before the revolution. Wartski's own count puts seven of them as still missing, of which only two are known to have survived the revolution at all. Other sources give six missing, and the counts drift because scholars disagree on whether a partially surviving egg or a surviving surprise counts as located. Before 2014 the missing number was eight.

The lesson of this object is not that treasure turns up at flea markets. It is that a correct, careful, detailed description is worthless without a name attached to it. Parke-Bernet described this egg accurately in 1964 down to the ring stretcher and the seventy-five point diamond, and sold it for the price of a used car, because nobody had written down whose it had been. The record, not the object, is what carries the value.