Revolutions and royal romances: the turbulent history of Fabergé eggs

May 1 1885 was a special day for Marie Feodorovna, Empress of Russia. It was Easter Day, and her husband, Tsar Alexander III, had a gift for her. For 19th-century Russian Orthodox Christians, Easter Day always came with the exchange of eggs, but this one had been made for her by the jeweller Peter Carl Fabergé. The tsar reported “back to Fabergé that the gift had had the desired effect on the recipient,” says Hanne Faurby, assistant curator at the V&A.

Thus the Romanov tradition of Fabergé’s imperial Easter eggs was born. After Alexander died in 1894, Marie received 20 more eggs from her son, Nicholas II, who also gave his wife Alexandra an egg every Easter until April 1916, when Easters as they knew them would come to an end.

This month is a significant one for the history of Fabergé. On November 20, the V&A’s exhibition Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution opens, showcasing over 200 objects, including a number of Easter eggs. Then, on November 29, Christie’s will auction 86 Fabergé objects from the collection of businessman Harry Woolf. But how did Fabergé grow so popular – and why did the Romanovs take to his eggs?

Dr Géza von Habsburg, curatorial director of Fabergé, is the world’s foremost expert on Fabergé’s Easter eggs. Sadly, he says, salacious tales surrounding the eggs are few: “In their time the eggs were not visible to anybody except the Russian imperial family. Nobody wrote about them, because nobody saw them.”

The first egg was a relatively modest affair. It cost Alexander III 4,151 rubles, explains Toby Faber in his 2008 book Fabergé’s Eggs; this was not so much “that the decision to order it needed very much thought.” The Diamond Trellis Egg, given to Marie in 1892, was a pale green shell of jade; its surprise – almost all the eggs contained a surprise – was a clockwork ivory elephant, a reminder of Marie’s childhood growing up as Princess Dagmar of Denmark, since an elephant appears on the coat of arms of the Danish royal family.

By 1913, Fabergé’s Winter Egg for Marie cost Nicholas II just under 25,000 rubles. The following year, the Mosaic Egg, made from hundreds of precious stones, looked “as though it could be made from tapestry of needlepoint,” writes Faber.

Some might suggest that the eggs represent something morbidly inevitable. “The history of the Russian imperial family is like a Greek tragedy,” says von Habsburg. “We see it coming.” But the eggs themselves are not to blame. “The fact that the Romanovs were spending huge sums on the eggs is not a good omen, but they were one of the richest families in the world, and could afford them.”

The Romanovs cared for their eggs, but did not necessarily consider them the most important elements of their collection. “There is a photograph of five of the eggs in a cabinet at the Alexander Palace,” says von Habsburg, “standing with other glass objects as if they were fairly commonplace. It doesn’t look as if the imperial family had any huge appreciation for them.” It puts one in mind of the F Scott Fitzgerald quote: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

Today, 103 years since the murder of the Romanovs, six of the original 52 eggs are still unaccounted for. After the family were deported to Siberia in August 1917, their possessions were sent for storage at the Kremlin Armoury Museum where they were catalogued, and virtually forgotten about until 1922, when Lenin ordered pre-sale inventories to be taken. Even by this point, seven of the eggs were missing. Over the years, some have surfaced, including the third egg, which was bought at a flea market in 2011 for $14,000. The owner, thinking he had overpaid, took it to Wartski, an antiques dealer specialising in Fabergé, where it was identified, and later sold for a rumoured ￡33m.

Today, 10 eggs remain at the Kremlin; three are on loan to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (having been purchased by oil heiress Matilda Geddings Gray); and nine are owned by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Most tantalisingly, three are in the Royal Collection. Queen Victoria introduced Fabergé to the Royal Collection when she acquired a notebook in 1896, but it was her son Edward VII and Queen Alexandra who made the biggest contribution to the collection, purchasing many trinkets from the New Bond Street shop.

That Queen Alexandra’s younger sister was Marie of Russia helped to circulate Fabergé around Europe’s royal families. “The two Danish princesses became the greatest publicity machine that Fabergé could have hoped for,” says Caroline de Guitaut, deputy surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Arts.

But it was not until 1931 that the Royal Collection included any imperial Easter eggs, when Queen Mary bought George V the Colonnade Egg of 1910. In 1933, she bought the 1901 Basket of Flowers Egg, before on May 22 1933, George V bought the Mosaic Egg from Cameo Corner, a shop on London’s Museum Street, for ￡250, as a present for his wife’s birthday. When we talk about George V and Queen Mary collecting Fabergé, we are really referring to Queen Mary, says Jane Ridley, author of George V: Never a Dull Moment.

The queen “saw it as her mission to enlarge and enhance the Royal Collection. Fabergé eggs were royal [objects], and she thought they were something that she ought to have, being stuff that came from Russia.” In 1995, having seen the Mosaic Egg in an exhibition at Buckingham Palace, the country-houses expert James Lees-Milne wondered in his diary: “Did George V feel guilty when he purchased it?”

Alongside George V and Queen Mary, eggs were bought by a variety of super-rich individuals. When English landowner Harry Clifton married Lillian Griswold in 1937, the newlyweds celebrated their marriage with the purchase of the 1894 Renaissance Egg. Later, the Cliftons bought the 1895 Rosebud Egg, which was later thrown in an argument as a “marital missile”. Other collectors included Lillian Pratt, who bought five eggs between 1933 and 1945; when she died in 1947, her collection was left to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and, writes Faber, was inexplicably “transported to the museum in cardboard boxes”.

But it was the media magnate Malcolm Forbes who really put a spotlight on the eggs. Between 1965, when he bought his first egg, and his death in 1990, he had collected nine imperial eggs; when in 2004 these were put up for sale, the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg paid over $100m for them. In 2013, Vekselberg told a BBC journalist that he didn’t keep the eggs at home: “It would look terrible if I put some imperial eggs on my buffet.” Instead, they are housed at the Fabergé Museum in St Petersburg.“Vekselberg’s intention,” von Habsburg explains, “was to bring back to Russia great Russian works of art, as a gesture of what he owed to Russia.”

The reputation of Fabergé’s Easter eggs has been rehabilitated over the last century. “Back in the 1920s they meant very little,” von Habsburg says. “They were considered examples of the excess of the ruling class.” Now, he adds, “a Fabergé exhibition with no eggs attracts no crowds.”

Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution runs November 20–May 8 2022 at the V&A. A Selection of Fabergé Masterpieces from the Harry Woolf Collection will be sold at Christie’s on November 20