This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/tinaoe on 2024-12-30 19:31:02+00:00.
Yes, there’s a fandom for Fabergé eggs. They call themselves egg sleuths occasionally, which I find incredibly adorable. After a full year of procrastinating I managed to write you up a semi-coherent overview of Fabergé egg enthusiasts and their so far biggest event: the discovery of the Third Imperial Egg, and the extremely dedicated fan archival work done by an American married duo, a middle aged Dutch lady and many more. But before we go into that, let’s establish what the goddamn hell a Fabergé egg is, why some of them are missing and what fans are doing about that.
Disclaimer, these eggs have some pretty confusing names. I’ll to do my best, and link pictures when available to hopefully help, but we’ll just have to hold hands and power through.
1. What are Fabergé eggs?
The House of Fabergé, which sounds like a great drag family name, was a jewelry firm founded in 1842 in Saint Petersburg by Gustav Faberge, later run by his sons & grandsons. Apparently they added the accent because everyone was really into the French in the mid 1800s, but I can’t find a solid source for that (the Fabergés also had roots as expelled French Huguenots).
The Russian imperial family, the Romanovs, first became aware of the Fabergés’ work at a Pan-Russian exhibition in Moscow where they displayed a replica of a 4th century BC bangle. Tsar Alexander III was so into it that he ordered the museum to display their work to “showcase contemporary Russian craftsmanship”, and in 1885 the Fabergés were awarded the title of “Goldsmith by special appointment to the Imperial Crown”.
Within this coveted relationship, Alexander III (who once folded a silver fork into a knot and threw it at an Austrian ambassador) ordered an Easter gift for his wife, Tsarina Maria Feodrovna. Easter being the most important celebration in the Russian orthodox church, no expenses were spared and the Fabergé workshop created the First Hen or Jeweled Egg
Allegedly inspired by an ivory decorative egg held in the Danish court (Maria, born Dagmar, was a Danish princess) the First Hen is only around 64mm/2.5 inch wide, made of white enamel and gold and opens to reveal a gold “yolk”. This opens as well and contains a 35mm/1.4 inch golden and ruby-endowed hen which finally opens to house both a tiny replica of the imperial crown and a ruby pendant (which are now missing). Very Matryoshka doll in spirit.
By all accounts the Tsarina absolutely adored the gift and Alexander put in a standing order at Fabergé. They were to craft a new egg-shaped object each Easter, stipulating that each should contain a “surprise” and that they should all be unique. While Alexander had some creative input to the first eggs (according to letters between him and his brother that were discovered in 1997), Fabergé would get full control over the design and craftsmanship after a few years.
And boy did they use that. Between 1885 and 1916, Fabergé created 50 “imperial eggs”, missing two years due to the Russo-Japanese War, with 2 additional eggs starting but not finishing construction. After Alexander’s death in 1894, his son Nicholas II continued the tradition and added an order for his own wife, Alexandra Feodrovna.
Overall, there were 30 eggs made for Maria and 20 for Alexandra, with the designs becoming more intricate and elaborate as time went on. The eggs ranged in size from under 7 cm to over 36 cm (3 to over 14 inches), contained mechanical tricks and new techniques, used precious stones and gems, and could almost always be opened to reveal a surprise inside. The surprise could be anything from miniature paintings of places and people relevant to the Tsarinas, a rad as hell moving mechanical swan, a whole ass Trans-Siberian Railway train, a singing bird with actual feathers, a miniature replica of an imperial ship etc etc. Or as curator Jo Briggs put it:
We think so much about the external aspects of the egg, but they’re really like the most expensive gift wrap you could ever make
The workshop needed basically the whole year to create the two eggs, starting right after Easter finished. And while everything was under the watching eyes of the Fabergés, we know that the design and actual crafting of the eggs were done by a variety of workers, craftmasters and designers like Mikhail Perkhin or Alma Pihl.
Fabergé also created eggs for other clients, most famously examples like the Kelch Rocailla Egg or the Rothschild Egg, but they were in general less elaborate than the imperial eggs and often copies of one another or the imperial eggs.
Production of the eggs stopped in the Russian Revolution, and when the Fabergé workshop was nationalised by the Bolsheviks in 1918 the Fabergé family left the country. Quite famously, the Romanovs were removed from power, imprisoned and shot in a basement in Yekatarinenburg (or you know, went on to fight an insane wizard and his adorable pet bat while falling in love with a kitchen boy).
And that’s where the eggs get very interesting.
2. What’s the issue with these goddamn eggs?
While Dowager Tsarina Maria actually survived the revolution via a hasty retreat to Crimea and then later UK with help by her nephew King George V (a journey that also included a few of her grandsons, six dogs and a canary), she as far as we know only had one egg with her: the last one she had been gifted, the 1916 Order of St. George Egg, which is described as “understated” and “simple” due to wartime by egg enthusiasts across the globe.
All other eggs were still in the possession of the imperial family. While the eggs had been exhibited very occasionally across the years they were usually housed in the private quarters at the Gatchina, Anichkov, Winter or Alexander Palaces. These palaces were looted and then confiscated during the revolution. The eggs were considered state property, and once the Soviet state started selling off treasures, eggs eventually started popping up in the UK and the US to be sold to the highest bidder.
For the vast majority of the 20th century, Fabergé eggs would show up at auctions, museums or private collections. Most famously probably the Hammer exhibits held by Armand Hammer (American business mogul). He acquired ten-ish (the ownership of some eggs is unclear) Imperial eggs and showed them to the public with great gusto in the 1930s.
However, people really had no idea of how they got there, how many were out there, or which egg was which. The Romanovs didn’t exactly put out newspaper announcements each year with a photograph of their new eggs, after all they were fairly personal gifts.
The exhibitions that were held before the revolution, mainly the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris and the 1902 Fabergé Artistic Objects Exhibition in St. Petersburg, had some surviving photos, but they were less nicely labeled museum-esque exhibits and more “a shit load of fancy, shiny stuff in a cabinet” captured from five meters away with an early 20th century camera. There were also so called “Fauxbergés”, eggs that either looked like Fabergé eggs, were of unsure origin or deliberately made to copy an imperial-style egg. With no clear list or descriptions of the actual imperial eggs, telling Fauxbergés apart was quite hard. On the flip side, other jewlers were also creating easter eggs and the Romanovs owned many as well, so there's also imperial non-Fabergé eggs to confuse the matter.
What the first egg sleuths knew was a vague number of eggs between 48 and 56-ish, that their amount was limited, that they were Easter gifts to the Tsarinas and by god, that more information on them must be somewhere. So they got to sleuthing.
However, it wasn’t that easy. Study of Fabergé, and especially the imperial goods, were discouraged in the Soviet Union. Western researchers also found it hard to access material from Russia, and auction houses were incredibly discrete about how and when they acquired them.
In the late 1980s to early 2000s once the Soviet Union disolved, a handful of significant sources were found and published. Marina Lopato, a curator at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, managed to find a handful of inventories and lists from the imperial time, mainly an album of Alexandra’s eggs after 1907 (missing all pictures but including descriptions & locations), a handwritten ...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1hpvai9/faberg%C3%A9_eggs_hunt_for_the_most_expensive_gift/