1902 The Empire Egg
Maria Feodorovna
Purchase price: 6,000 roubles
Presented by the Emperor Nicholas II to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna at Gatchina, Easter, April 14, 1902. In his “History of the House of Fabergé” Franz Birbaum notes that Imperial Easter eggs were designed to reflect some especially significant event in the life of the Imperial family for the given year. Thus, the impending marriage of the Dowager Empress’s daughter was a fine and fair subject for an Easter egg. The engagement was announced right after Easter, in May of 1901. This announcement of the wedding of Grand Duchess Olga would have come exactly at the right time for the Fabergé firm, as the Imperial Eggs took about a year to produce.
The egg is vertically divided into one half and two conforming quadrants, carved from a single block of fine Siberian nephrite. The exterior is decorated in the Empire style applied with openwork gold anthemiae and scrolling foliate motifs, the quad- rants of the egg bordered by rope-twist and step-modeled framing, the whole with a broad yellow gold frieze applied on front two quadrants with green gold monograms for Grand Duchess Olga (“O” – reconstructed) and Prince Peter of Oldenburg (“П” – reconstructed), within laurel wreaths and festoons separated by torches en flambeau and kneeling winged Nike figures also bearing torches. The reverse is similarly decorated with laurel wreaths, one applied with a cypher of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (“МӨ” – reconstructed), the other bearing the date “1902” (original). The egg is surmounted by a gold Imperial crown set over ribbons, fitted with a pair of twin diamond brilliants against a cage-work back (reconstructed, modeled after the sketches furnished from the archives of Tatiana Fabergé).
When pressed, a lobed round knob at the bottom of the egg activates a hinged spring mechanism, releasing the front quadrants to reveal an egg-shaped oyster guilloché frame with gold mounts in the style of the external decoration: a winged Nike figure holding scrolling foliate ornaments which surround a central circular aperture framed with gold and small natural half-pearls containing a double-portrait miniature of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna and her husband Prince Peter, Duke of Oldenburg (oil on zinc, reconstructed). The miniature conceals the spring mechanism, which opens the doors of the egg. The spring lock mechanism the engraved signature of the workman “K. Ingman 1902”. The interior of the hinged gold-mounted egg-shaped doors applied with polished concave gold bands, engraved with entwined laurel wreaths and arrows framed by laurel bands, serving to conceal the external mounting of the cyphers, the borders of the mount likewise engraved with trailing foliage.
The egg is suspended between two gold-mounted nephrite columns fixed to a rectangular stepped nephrite plinth by means of silver rods placed inside the columns and extending into the plinth. The plinth is decorated with gold die-cast bas relief appliques depicting swans with wings displayed above scroll supports holding laurel swags, and flanked by laurel wreaths (three swans to the width of front and back, one to the width of each side), and with molded leaf tip borders. The columns are each applied at the base with a relief of classical tripodal incense burners flanked by laurel wreaths, ribbons, and rosettes, each column hung with a gold rosette-cast band suspending crossed ropes and rosettes set in oval pendants, headed with chased palmette capitals, each supporting a gold sculpture of a swan with a delicately curved neck and naturalistically-spread wings.
The Empire details of this piece, as with so many other Empire-style pieces by Fabergé, can be traced to a specific model, Mirror et Table à Fleurs Executée pour Mr. V. of 1812, by the Paris firm of Percier et Fontaine and shown in their Le Receuil et Décoration des Intérieures…
In July of 1917, the egg was recorded in the Dowager Empress’ rooms at Gatchina palace.