Buying Heritage Guide
The Faberge imperial eggs, as documented
No craft story on this site is surrounded by more invention: the eggs deserve the discipline of the record, and the record is spectacular enough.
The imperial Easter eggs of the House of Faberge are the most famous craft objects made in Saint Petersburg, and the least well served by the stories told about them. Popular accounts attach the eggs to ballerinas, lost princesses and secret collections with a confidence the documents never share. The documented history needs no help: a jewelry house founded in 1842, a first imperial egg in 1885, fifty eggs for two emperors, and a museum on the Fontanka canal where nine of them can be studied today.
The house and the appointment
Gustav Faberge opened the jewelry firm in Saint Petersburg in 1842. His son Peter Carl Faberge took the house’s direction in the early 1880s and rebuilt it around an idea that changed decorative art: the finished object as a coordinated work, designed by the house, executed by specialist workshops under one mark. The house employed the best goldsmiths, enamelers and lapidaries of the capital, working guilloche enamel, hardstone carving from the Urals and miniature mechanics into objects that surprised their owners.
The imperial connection began in 1885, when Alexander III commissioned an Easter egg for his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna. The first egg is documented in detail: a white enamel shell the size of a real egg that opened to a gold yolk, the yolk to a golden hen, and inside the hen a diamond crown with a ruby pendant. The empress was delighted, the emperor made the commission a tradition, and after 1894 Nicholas II continued it for his mother and his wife through the last completed imperial eggs of the wartime years.
Counting the eggs without dreaming
The firm made fifty imperial Easter eggs between 1885 and the end of the empire, a number the specialist literature has long established. Two further eggs commissioned for Easter 1917 were left unfinished by the revolution. Around the imperial series stand the documented private commissions, above all the seven great eggs made from 1898 for the industrialist Alexander Kelch and his wife, modeled deliberately on the imperial precedent. Counting every documented egg across all commissions, the historic total lands in the mid to high fifties, and catalogues still adjust by one when a lost piece surfaces or an attribution falls.
Here the discipline matters more than anywhere else on this site. Popular lists circulate attributions that the firm’s own records do not support, including romantic stories tying early eggs to ballet dancers; none of that belongs in a careful history, and this guide declines to repeat it. What the record supports is already remarkable: two emperors, three decades of Easter surprises, a workshop at the summit of its craft.
Where the eggs are now, and why a museum matters
Most imperial eggs survive, scattered across royal collections, national museums and private hands; a minority are lost, known from photographs and archives. The largest group open to the public formed when the Forbes Collection in New York, eleven imperial eggs among other Faberge work, was bought in 2004 and taken to Russia by the Link of Times foundation. In 2013 the Faberge Museum opened in the Shuvalov Palace on the Fontanka canal in Saint Petersburg, and its collection includes nine imperial eggs, the sequence a visitor can study from the 1885 Hen onward.
| Year | Event | Documentary basis |
|---|---|---|
| 1842 | Gustav Faberge opens the jewelry firm in Saint Petersburg | House records and trade registers |
| 1885 | First imperial egg, the Hen, commissioned by Alexander III | Imperial invoices and surviving object |
| 1898 | First of seven Kelch eggs, the private parallel series | Kelch commission records |
| 1916 | Last completed imperial eggs, wartime works | Order books of the firm |
| 2004 | Forbes Collection of Faberge bought and taken to Russia | Sale documentation |
| 2013 | Faberge Museum opens in the Shuvalov Palace, nine imperial eggs | Museum catalogue |
Why the eggs belong on a craft site
Strip away the mythology and the eggs are the extreme case of everything this site teaches: materials mastered, a technique signed, a documented provenance. Guilloche enamel, the engine turned translucence over foiled color, is a technique a collector can recognize on smaller Faberge and contemporaneous work; hardstone figures from Ural minerals descend from the same lapidary trade as the crafts of this site; and the discipline of reading marks, hallmarks, workmaster initials, inventory numbers, is the same discipline the nesting doll base teaches. The eggs are also a warning priced in millions: the objects most surrounded by stories are the ones that need documents most.
A collector’s checklist
- Keep to documented numbers: fifty imperial eggs, seven Kelch eggs, mid fifties in total.
- Trust invoices, workmaster marks and catalogue entries over any romantic attribution.
- Treat the Shuvalov Palace museum as the reference point for the imperial sequence.
- Enjoy the legends as legends, and never let them set a price.
Common mistakes
- Repeating lost egg discoveries, ballerina gifts and secret collections as established fact.
- Assuming every ornate Easter egg is imperial work, when the firm made thousands of non egg objects and imitators made thousands more.
- Counting eggs without the archive, when catalogues revise and myths do not.
- Letting the mythology of the eggs shadow the documented crafts beside them, which can actually be held and studied.
The bottom line: the Faberge record is a masterclass in provenance. Fifty documented imperial eggs, a documented museum, a documented technique; the story that survives checking is richer than the ones invented to avoid it.