The Patron Who Left No Invoices

The selling house says there is no order for this egg

Christie's 2007 catalogue for the Rothschild Faberge egg states that no document recording an order for it survives, and that the same is true of every private commission the Faberge workshops carried out in Saint Petersburg.

The sentence is an auction house saying the least commercially useful thing available to it: as is the case of all private commissions executed by the Faberge workshops in St. Petersburg, there is no surviving documentary evidence recording an order for this newly discovered Rothschild Egg. No commission date, no price, no ledger entry naming anybody.

That is a problem this archive is built to take seriously. The object is in the Hermitage, signed, dated and measurable, and the person usually named as the reason it exists is attached to it by inference rather than by paper.

The one document is a codicil written fifty-three years later

The evidence that Beatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild gave the egg is a codicil of 22 March 1958 to the will of Germaine de Rothschild, the woman who received it.

Christie's prints its own English translation of the clause, in which the testator calls the object my Faberge clock in pink enamel, which was given to me as an engagement present by Beatrix. The engagement was to Beatrice's younger brother Edouard, and the couple married in 1905. So the document is a dated legal instrument rather than family hearsay, which is better than most provenance gets, and it is still a recollection set down more than half a century after the event by the recipient. The French text the translation is working from does not appear on the live catalogue page at all, where eight empty line breaks sit in its place, so what is quotable is Christie's English and not the codicil's words.

Read the catalogue's own provenance line and the distinction is already there. It runs from Charlotte Beatrice Ephrussi, nee de Rothschild, gift to Germaine de Rothschild, nee Halphen. It says gift to. It does not say commissioned by.

Christie's went further in the other direction. Its press release of 4 October 2007 proposed that it is possible that Maurice ordered the egg whilst in St. Petersburg, or during one of Faberge's selling trips to Paris at the turn of the 20th century, Maurice Ephrussi being her husband, an Odessa-born banker who had worked for the family's oil interests in Baku. The house that sold the object did not assert that she ordered it. Our own record did, and it should not have.

The Imperial egg has a letter, an intermediary and an invoice

The comparison this archive can make, because it holds both objects, is with the Third Imperial egg of 1887, whose commission is documented down to the invoice.

A letter of 4 May 1887 in the old style, from Modest Solovyev of the Office of Grand Duke Vladimir's Court to Nikolai Petrov, the Head of Cabinet of Alexander III, records that an Easter egg with a clock and a stand in the style of Louis XVI was commissioned to the jeweller Faberge, that it was finished and delivered to the Emperor, and that Faberge had sent an invoice of 2,160 roubles. Our record for that egg carries the same figure from the delivery side.

One detail in it should stop anyone drawing too neat a moral. The Imperial egg was not ordered by the Tsar in person either. The letter says it was commissioned by order of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. What separates the two objects is not that an emperor signed for one and a woman for the other. It is that one order passed through an office that kept its correspondence and its invoices, and the other did not pass through any office at all.

Even the dating of the private egg runs through an Imperial document. Christie's dates it from a workshop photograph in Wartski's collection showing it made beside a silver cigar box shaped as a medieval helmet, and what fixes the year is that the box was delivered to the Imperial Cabinet at 1,500 roubles and presented to Kaiser Wilhelm II on 19 July 1902. Kieran McCarthy of Wartski argued the identification from the count of garlands above the pedestal, against the near-identical Kelch Chanticleer egg of 1904. Christie's calls that proof beyond doubt; it is an argument from the absence of a third egg with the same mounts, which is a different thing.

The museum that owns it credits two makers and no patron

The Hermitage's own catalogue record for the object names the workmaster and the clockmaker and does not mention Beatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild at all.

It gives the author as Perkhin, Michael, 1860 to 1903, as master, and Rode, Nikolay, active early twentieth century, as clockmaker; the organisation as the House of Faberge; the title as Rothschild Clock Egg; the date as 1902; the museum number as E-18382, the E being Cyrillic; and the acquisition as entered the Hermitage Museum in 2015 as the Gift from the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin. The handover ceremony was held on 8 December 2014, at the museum's 250th anniversary, and the accession is recorded in the following year, which are two different facts and should be given as two.

The route there is documented mainly by the buyer talking to newspapers. Alexander Ivanov bought the egg at Christie's in 2007 and confirmed to Moskovsky Komsomolets in December 2014 that the egg the president presented was the one he had bought. A specialist site that tracks these objects writes that as far as its author knows it was not made public how the Russian State came into possession of them. So the object's twenty-first century provenance has the same shape as its first: a gift whose paperwork nobody has produced.

Specialists say it is a clock, and that it had been published before

Two of the claims that carried the 2007 sale are contested by the specialist reference site for Faberge.

The Faberge Research Site records that scholars do not agree the object should be called an egg, suggesting a clock made in the shape of one, and that it was not presented at Easter. The Hermitage catalogues it as the Rothschild Clock Egg. The second claim is larger: Christie's called it previously unrecorded and its press release said it had never been published, while the same specialist site states that a photograph of the clock has been found in Rheims, Maurice, L'Objet 1900, 1964. We have not seen that plate and report it as the site's claim, but it contradicts the line the publicity was built on.

The money should be stated the way the house stated it. Christie's published an estimate of 6,000,000 to 9,000,000 pounds and a price realised of 8,980,500 pounds, premium-inclusive, and no hammer figure at all; the lot also carried VAT at 5 per cent on the hammer price and 15 per cent on the buyer's premium. Any hammer in circulation for this object is somebody's reconstruction, not a Christie's number.

Two institutions with custody of her things say the paperwork is gone

The missing Faberge order is not a gap in an otherwise documented collector. It is the ordinary state of the record for everything she bought.

The Academie des Beaux-Arts, writing about the collection it owns, interrupts its own sentence about a Weisweiler table to say, in our translation of its French, that unfortunately the sources are missing. Ulrich Leben, writing in the Rothschild Archive's own Review of the Year for 2008 to 2009, says that the origin of the greatest part of this furniture remains a mystery, as the archival sources are lacking, and that there is a lack of archival evidence related to the acquisition, payment, or remittances, of work and objects, which limits considerably the possibility of carrying out a detailed analysis. He also warns that many stories exist of purchases which cannot be substantiated, giving as an example Hector Lefuel's claim that she bought the panelling from Josephine Bonaparte's mirror room. That is why no construction cost for the villa has ever been published: the payment records are not in the family archive.

What the same study does establish is that she acted on her own judgement. Leben records that she was a keen auction enthusiast, which was unusual for a Rothschild, that she bought at public auction and returned to the saleroom to renew her collections, and that by the 1934 inventories most of what she had inherited from her father was gone, the antique and Dutch paintings among it. The cleanest documented commission of her own is not the egg at all: for a set of chairs stamped by Parmentier, a joiner of Lyon, she had a silk specially woven at Prelle to a pattern from her own textile collection, and orders to the lacquer artist Jean Dunand are documented in the Fond Laprade.

What is fully documented is the giving away

Her bequest is recorded day by day, which is the exact inverse of her buying.

Leben prints the clause: she bequeathed to the Institut de France, for the Academie des Beaux-Arts, the Villa Ile de France at Saint Jean Cap Ferrat with all the works of art and furniture and the gardens, for the purposes of creating a museum, adding everything in the Paris house at 19 avenue Foch and in the two Monte Carlo villas, and directing that as much as possible the museum keeps its current appearance as a salon and that the valuable pieces are kept behind glass. The legatee is the Institut de France acting for the Academie, a precision most accounts drop.

Then the dates. She died at the Hotel d'Angleterre in Davos in April 1934; Leben's study prints her age at death as 70, although she was born on 14 September 1864 and was therefore 69. On 11 April, the day of her burial at Pere Lachaise, the notary sent word to the Academie; on 15 April the Institut was informed; on 20 April Widor wrote to Edouard de Rothschild that the Academie had accepted and had appointed Albert Tournaire curator, and the coffers were opened and the inventory taken. A note on a letter from the Academie's permanent secretary Charles Widor shows she had made her intentions clear four years earlier, and that when Widor called at the Faubourg Saint-Honore to tell her uncle and aunt, they had not been aware of their niece's generosity.

The size of it is given as not fewer than 5,000 works of art by both the Academie and the villa's own history, and as more than 5,300 pieces by French Wikipedia, which cites nothing for the higher figure. A Paris newspaper, L'Intransigeant of 16 April 1934, reported that a capital of six million francs went with the villa; the will clause as quoted does not mention money, so that figure rests on one press report.

The building itself keeps the pattern. Leben names eight architects consulted and has Auburtin drawing the plans and Messiah then changing everything; the Academie says she exhausted four; the villa's own history does not name Messiah at all and English Wikipedia credits him alone. Nobody has published what any of it cost, because the payment records are not there.

Her name is on the object and not in its record

The object is called the Rothschild egg by the trade, by the press and by the museum, and the Rothschild Archive's own study of the family's Faberge dealings does not contain her name.

Kieran McCarthy's article for that archive identifies twenty-five members of the family as Faberge customers and states they purchased exclusively from the firm's London branch, which opened in 1903. A search of its text returns no occurrence of Ephrussi and none of Beatrice. The same article names a second route for the French branch, purchases made on the firm's regular sales trips to Paris, and Christie's catalogue restricts the word exclusively to the English Rothschilds. So a 1902 date does not put the egg outside the documented channels, and the Paris selling trip Christie's reaches for is one McCarthy himself records. The absence that stands is her name, not the date.

So the naming runs the wrong way round. A family name attached to the object has become its title, while the woman who gave it is absent from the museum's record of it, absent from the archive's study of the family's purchases from that firm, and present in the sale catalogue as the first line of a provenance and as the giver named in somebody else's will. She is in this archive because she gave things away and because an institution wrote down what it received. That is how a woman's patronage usually survives, and it is worth knowing that it is the receiving end that does the recording.

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