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Collecting: Fabergé Treasures

Sotheby's egg auction of the century gets preempted by a private bid that will return the entire Forbes Fabergé collection to Russia.

Jack Bettridge
From the Print Edition:
Andy Garcia, Mar/April 2004

So pleased was Alexander III with the gift that he charged Peter Carl Fabergé with creating a new egg  each Easter. The jeweler, the descendant of a Huguenot family that had fled religious persecution in France in the seventeenth century, seems to have been given free rein except that each egg would be unique and contain a surprise within. After the tsar’s death in 1894, the jeweler was asked by his successor, Nicholas II, to create two eggs each Easter—one for his mother, the dowager empress, and one for his wife, Alexandra. The request led to exquisite workmanship in an ever-changing variety of styles and inspirations. Fabergé’s biographer and onetime manager of his London shop, Henry Charles Bainbridge, called him “a genius on the rampage, always in search of something on which to vent his creative skill.”

The tradition of giving eggs—albeit nowhere near as grand—was long-standing, probably with pagan roots as a fertility symbol, although it was Christianized to signify the Resurrection. The Imperial Fabergé eggs, however, almost never had a religious theme. Each year’s installments were more likely to commemorate current events. Hence the Coronation Egg, given after Nicholas took the throne, and another that marked the completion of the Trans Siberian Railroad.

Fabergé would continue to create eggs until 1917, when his last two would not be delivered. In all, as many as 58 are believed to have been created. Eight are unaccounted for. Ten remain in the possession of the Kremlin. Armand Hammer, working on a humanitarian mission in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, persuaded Western collectors to buy many of the eggs from the cash-strapped, fledgling government. The dowager empress, who was rescued after the revolution, took with her The Order of St. George egg, the only one to leave Russia with its original recipient.

The jeweler fled Russia in 1918, dying in 1920 at age 74. He had always shrouded the eggs in mystery, keeping them a secret even from the tsar until delivery. Some were never photographed and the family displayed them but once. Fabergé rarely spoke of them, even to the sycophantic Bainbridge, who was able to elicit a price estimate (30,000 rubles each) from one of Fabergé’s sons years later. Hill declined to translate that value into today’s dollars, but likened the purchase to that of a one-off super sports car.

For his part, Kip Forbes, who recalls his father bringing eggs home in shopping bags, predicted their return to Russia, if not the buyer, when he said before the sale: “If Mr. Putin decides it’s in the national interest, he could come with a really big wallet.”

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