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Most Easter egg hunts don’t begin with a revolution and end with a millionaire. But most Easter eggs aren’t made of gold, ringed with sapphires and topped with diamonds like the one in this tale of a priceless artefact being sold to buy a tractor and living in obscurity for almost a century.
Once upon a time, master jeweller Carl Fabergé created 50 fabulous eggs for Russian tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II. After the 1917 Revolution, the Bolsheviks seized them. Some were kept but most were sold to the West (Queen Mary bought two, now part of the Royal Collection and rarely on display). Eight remained unaccounted for, with only three believed to have survived the revolution.
Given to his wife as an 1887 Easter gift by Alexander III, the Third Imperial Fabergé Easter Egg is the focus of this story. It was last seen in public in 1902 in a St Petersburg exhibition and was sold in Moscow in 1922, as part of the Soviet ‘Treasures into Tractors’ policy. Then it disappeared from view.
In 2011, after a long and frustrating search for the egg, complicated by the fact that scholars had for years confused it with another one (the Blue Serpent Clock Egg), American Fabergé experts Vincent and Anna Palmade found an illustration of it in an old auction catalogue. It had been sold, unidentified, in New York in 1964 for $2,450 (about £875 at the time). This discovery sparked a race to determine the whereabouts of the egg, which was by then worth tens of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, it had been sold at least once more, this time in a market in the Midwest for $14,000, to a buyer who planned to sell it on for the gold’s scrap value. Incredibly, no one had offered the asking price, so the egg was saved from the melting pot.
A decade on, it eventually occurred to the disappointed dealer to do some research and he discovered a Telegraph article about the hunt for the egg, which quoted Kieran McCarthy, director of antique dealer Wartski. When our egg hoarder showed him a photograph, McCarthy knew immediately what he was looking at. He bought the treasure for a private collector and the finder received around £20 million.
The 8.2cm egg will go on show at Wartski in Mayfair for four days. Viewing is free, but queues are expected, so get there early to beat the Fabergé fans.
And the story’s not over yet. Two more eggs, last seen in 1952 and 1934, are also known to have survived the revolution. So if you think you have one knocking around at home, it could be worth getting eggcited about.