Fabergè: the egg jewel of the tsars that conquered the whole world, its history

The story of the Fabergè egg was born in Orthodox Russia. And it is 1885 that marks the twentieth anniversary of Tsar Alexander III and Tsarina Maria Fedorovna, and the tsar needs an exceptional gift for his wife to mark the occasion. So he places an order with a young jeweler, Peter Carl Faberge. On Easter morning, Fabergé delivers what appears to be a simple enamelled egg to the palace. But to the delight of the empress, there is a golden yolk inside; in the yolk is a golden hen; and hidden inside the hen is a diamond miniature of the royal crown and a tiny ruby ​​egg, both now lost to history. His wife's joy is all the tsar needs to reward Peter Carl Fabergé Fabergé with a commission for an Easter egg every year. The requirements are simple: each egg must be unique and each must contain a suitable surprise for the Empress. With consummate craftsmanship and an inventive spirit, Fabergé rises to the challenge again and again, drawing inspiration from the gilded lives of the Tsar and Tsarina.

CAREER

Peter Carl Faberge was born in St. Petersburg in 1846, son of the jeweler Gustav and his Danish wife Charlotte Jungstedt. There he went to the private German school St. Anna. In 1860 the family moved to Dresden, where Peter Carl Faberge attended commercial school. After graduating, the XNUMX-year-old embarked on an extensive study tour, during which he completed training as a jeweler at the Friedman house in Frankfurt am Main.

In 1864 Peter Carl Faberge returned to his hometown as a fully trained craftsman and joined his father's jewelery business, which he took over in 1872. That was the beginning of the unstoppable rise of the Fabergé jewelery manufactory to fame world. Peter and his brother Agathon, born in 1862, captivated visitors to the All-Russian Exhibition in Moscow in 1882. For his work, Peter Carl Faberge was awarded the Gold Medal. Just three years later, Tsar Alexander III appointed him Court Supplier. The impetus for this great honor was the creation of the first of the legendary Imperial Easter Eggs that same year.

Peter Carl Faberge's reputation did not stop at the borders of Russia. In 1897 the royal houses of Sweden and Norway appointed him court goldsmith. In 1900, at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II, he represented Russian craftsmanship at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. The success was overwhelming. For his miniature replicas of the Tsarist Crown Jewels, he was awarded the Gold Medal and was inducted into the Legion of Honour. Peter Carl Faberge reached the pinnacle of his fame when Tsar Nicholas II appointed him Court Goldsmith in 1910. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the demand for precious jewelery and objets d'art dropped dramatically. In 1917 Peter Carl Faberge sold his shares in the company to his employees and fled the chaos of the October Revolution via Riga and Berlin to Wiesbaden. He died in 1920 in Lausanne, Switzerland. His mortal remains were transferred to Cannes to rest alongside those of his wife Augusta.

As court purveyor to the last two Russian tsars, Peter Carl Faberge was given the great honor of using the Romanov family crest – the famous double eagle – in his company logo. This was the visible expression of a development that began in 1882 at the All-Russian Exhibition in Moscow. The then wife of the tsar, Maria Feodorovna had purchased a pair of cufflinks from Fabergè for her husband, Tsar Alexander III. From then on, the clients of this family business were wealthy and noble. The company was founded in 1842 by Peter Carl's father, the jeweler Gustav Faberge. However, it was only after Peter Carl joined the company that he managed to reach the pinnacle of European art. In 1869 he sold the first pieces to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. In 1885 he won the gold medal at an exhibition in Nuremberg for his replicas of the ancient Scythian treasure of Kerch. The same year, Tsar Alexander III gave him the order to produce the first imperial Easter egg. The result – the hen's egg – was received with such enthusiasm by the ruler, revered as divine, that he renewed the order for an Easter egg every year thereafter. At the Russian Orthodox Easter holiday, he gave them to his wife. From 1895 to 1916, his successor, Nicholas II, gave two Easter eggs every year, one to his wife and one to his mother. In 1896 he produced all the gifts for the coronation ceremonies for the young Tsar Nicholas II. The opening of the first branch in Moscow a year later initiated a development that would end with Fabergé as the largest company in Russia with 500 employees and branches in Odessa (1890), Kiev (1900) and London (1903). The move to the new premises at Bolshaya-Morskaya 24 in St. Petersburg at a cost of half a million rubles was a visible expression of the rise of the dynasty. In all, more than 150.000 jewels and art objects were produced in the various workshops, all unique.

In 1914, however, the jewel manufacturing star began to fade. Many of the craftsmen were drafted into military service. The tsar ordered Peter Carl Faberge to produce hand grenades and shell casings. In 1918 the Bolsheviks nationalized the company. In 1924 Peter Carl's sons, Eugène and Alexander, founded the company “Fabergè & Cie” in a vain attempt to revive the company's faded reputation. However, the void left by his father, who died four years earlier, was too great. In 1951 the company name was transferred to Fabergè Inc. In 1989, its legal successor, Fabergè Co., New York, named the Pforzheim jeweler Victor Mayer as Fabergè's exclusive world master and authorized him to commercialize the precious works of art through the members of the Collegium Fabergè.

On the market it is not easy to find original Fabergè objects but it can happen, it happened that in 2013, a scrap metal dealer in the American Midwest bought a golden egg for $ 14.000, with the intention of melting it down and selling it at a profit of a few hundred dollars. But no one would accept his offer: he was thought to have paid too much for the egg, the lady's watch and the jewels it contained. So he turned to the Internet and soon realized that he had stumbled upon Fabergé's Third Imperial Egg, a gift from Tsar Alexander III to his wife Maria on Easter 1887. Thanks to an anonymous collector, the few hundred dollars of profit from the junkyard turned into a reported $33.000.000 fee.