The Alexander III Commemorative Egg of 1910 is one of the Imperial Easter eggs produced by the House of Fabergé under the direction of Peter Carl Fabergé for Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Commissioned to mark the centenary of the birth of Tsar Alexander III — Nicholas's father and predecessor — the egg stands among the most enigmatic objects in the history of decorative art and jewellery. It belongs to a subset of eight Imperial Fabergé eggs whose present whereabouts are entirely unknown, lost to history in the upheaval that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917. Unlike many of its companion pieces, no authenticated photograph, no detailed workshop description, and no surviving inventory entry with sufficient particularity has come to light to establish what the egg looked like. Its existence is confirmed by archival documentation from the Fabergé workshop records, yet beyond that bare fact, the object itself has vanished.

The Imperial Easter Egg Commission

The tradition of Imperial Fabergé Easter eggs began in 1885, when Alexander III commissioned the first egg — the so-called Hen Egg — as an Easter gift for his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna. The practice was continued by Nicholas II, who each year presented two eggs: one to his mother, Maria Feodorovna, and one to his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna. Over the course of the Imperial commission, which ran from 1885 until 1916, a total of fifty eggs are generally accepted by scholars as having been delivered to the Imperial family, though the precise number has been debated. Each egg was accompanied by a surprise — a concealed interior object of extraordinary craftsmanship — and each was produced to a unique design, typically referencing a significant event, anniversary, or theme of personal meaning to the Imperial household.

The 1910 egg falls within the mature period of the commission, when Fabergé's workshops — principally those of head workmaster Henrik Wigström, who had succeeded Michael Perchin upon the latter's death in 1903 — were operating at the height of their technical and artistic powers. The year 1910 was a productive one for the firm: other eggs from the same year include the Colonnade Egg, presented to Alexandra Feodorovna, which survives in the Royal Collection at Sandringham. The Alexander III Commemorative Egg was, by contrast, almost certainly destined for the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, given that it honoured the memory of her late husband.

Alexander III and His Centenary

Tsar Alexander III reigned from 1881 until his death in 1894, succeeding his father Alexander II following the latter's assassination. He was known for a conservative, autocratic style of rule, a reversal of the reformist tendencies of his predecessor, and for a foreign policy that earned Russia a period of relative peace — a fact that shaped his posthumous reputation within the Romanov family. He was also a significant patron of the arts, and it was under his reign that the Fabergé commission itself was inaugurated. His physical stature — he was an exceptionally large and powerful man — and his personal character became the stuff of family legend within the Romanov dynasty.

The centenary of his birth fell in 1845, meaning the commemorative egg of 1910 marked sixty-five years since his birth rather than one hundred — a point that has occasionally caused confusion in secondary literature. The centenary in question is that of 1845 counted forward to 1910 as a sixty-fifth anniversary, or alternatively the egg may have been conceived as honouring the centenary of a different associated date. Some scholars have proposed that the commission was tied to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Imperial egg, itself given by Alexander III, though this interpretation is not universally accepted. What is agreed is that the egg's thematic content was intended to honour Alexander III specifically.

The Problem of Documentation

The evidentiary situation surrounding the 1910 Alexander III Commemorative Egg is stark. The Fabergé firm maintained ledgers and order books, portions of which survived the Revolution and subsequent Soviet period, eventually becoming available to researchers. These records confirm that an egg with a commemorative association to Alexander III was produced in 1910 and delivered. Beyond this, the documentary trail effectively ends. No design drawing from the Fabergé archives has been identified with certainty as corresponding to this egg. No contemporary photograph — neither from the Imperial household albums nor from any published source of the period — has been matched to it. No detailed written description, of the kind that survives for many other Imperial eggs, is known to exist.

This absence of visual documentation places the 1910 egg in a particularly difficult category. For several other lost Imperial eggs — such as the Mauve Egg of 1897 or the Royal Danish Egg of 1903, both of which are also missing — at least partial descriptions or period references exist to give researchers some purchase on their appearance. The Alexander III Commemorative Egg of 1910 offers almost none of this. It is, in the language of provenance scholarship, a ghost object: confirmed to have existed, impossible to describe.

Fate After the Revolution

The Imperial Fabergé eggs were seized by the Bolshevik government following the Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent execution of the Imperial family in 1918. The eggs passed into the control of the Soviet state and were inventoried — imperfectly and inconsistently — by various Soviet agencies over the following years. The Soviets, facing acute foreign currency shortages, sold significant portions of the Imperial collection through various channels during the 1920s and 1930s, including through the trading organisation Antikvariat and via dealers such as Armand Hammer. A number of Imperial eggs entered Western collections through these transactions, and their subsequent histories are, in most cases, traceable.

The eggs that did not enter the Western market during this period — those that were not sold, not transferred to Soviet museums, and not otherwise accounted for — form the group of lost eggs. The Alexander III Commemorative Egg of 1910 is among them. Whether it was destroyed during the revolutionary period, melted down for its precious metal content, lost in the chaos of repeated transfers between Soviet institutions, or quietly sold through channels that left no surviving paper trail, is not known. The possibility that it survives in an unidentified private collection, its identity unrecognised, cannot be entirely excluded, though scholars regard this as unlikely given the intensity of research that has been applied to the Imperial series over the past several decades.

The Eight Lost Imperial Eggs

The Alexander III Commemorative Egg of 1910 is one of eight Imperial eggs currently classified as lost. The full list, as accepted by the principal scholarly authorities on the subject, includes:

• The Mauve Egg (1897)
• The Royal Danish Egg (1903)
• The Necessaire Egg (1889)
• The Cherub with Chariot Egg (1888)
• The Hen with Sapphire Pendant Egg (1886)
• The Empire Nephrite Egg (1902)
• The Alexander III Commemorative Egg (1910)
• The Birch Egg (1917, undelivered)

It should be noted that scholarly consensus on the precise composition of this list has shifted over time as research has progressed. The discovery in 2014 of the so-called Third Imperial Egg — identified by a London antiques dealer and subsequently confirmed by the Fabergé Research Site and other authorities — demonstrated that lost eggs can, in principle, resurface. That discovery reduced the number of lost eggs from nine to eight and renewed public interest in the possibility of further recoveries. The Alexander III Commemorative Egg of 1910 remains, however, one of the least documented of the missing pieces, and no credible candidate object has been proposed for its identification.

Gemmological and Material Significance

Because no physical description of the egg survives, it is impossible to characterise its materials with any specificity. Imperial Fabergé eggs of the 1905–1916 period — the era of Henrik Wigström's workmastership — typically employed gold as the primary structural metal, frequently enamelled in translucent colours over engine-turned (guilloché) grounds. Gemstone embellishment was standard, with rose-cut and old European-cut diamonds the most commonly used stones, supplemented by rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls depending on the design. Hardstone elements — nephrite, bowenite, rock crystal, and various jaspers — appeared frequently, both as structural components and as decorative inlays.

Eggs with a commemorative or portrait function, as the Alexander III egg presumably was, often incorporated miniature paintings — typically executed in enamel on ivory or metal — depicting the honoured individual. The Fabergé workshops employed skilled miniaturists for this purpose, and portrait miniatures of Alexander III appear in several surviving objects from the firm's output. It is reasonable, though entirely speculative, to suppose that the 1910 egg included some such portrait element. The surprise — the concealed interior object — might equally have taken the form of a miniature portrait, a small sculptural figure, or a mechanical device of the kind for which Fabergé was celebrated. None of this can be stated with any confidence.

Scholarly and Market Context

The study of Imperial Fabergé eggs is a specialised field with a relatively small number of authoritative researchers. The foundational scholarly work was carried out by A. Kenneth Snowman, whose monograph on Fabergé, first published in 1953 and subsequently revised, established the framework within which later researchers have worked. More recent scholarship has been advanced by Géza von Habsburg, Tatiana Fabergé, and the researchers associated with the Fabergé Research Site, which maintains the most current and rigorously sourced database of Imperial egg documentation.

In the auction market, Imperial Fabergé eggs command extraordinary prices when they appear. The Rothschild Egg, sold at Christie's London in 2007, achieved approximately £8.98 million. The Winter Egg, sold at Christie's New York in 2002, realised $9.57 million. These figures reflect not only the intrinsic value of the materials but the historical significance, rarity, and cultural weight that the Imperial eggs carry. A lost egg, were it to be identified and authenticated, would command a premium beyond any previously recorded sale, given the additional narrative of rediscovery. The Alexander III Commemorative Egg of 1910, precisely because it is so poorly documented, would present extraordinary challenges of authentication — challenges that no existing gemmological or art-historical methodology could fully resolve without corroborating documentary evidence.

Legacy and Continuing Search

The lost Imperial Fabergé eggs occupy a peculiar position in the cultural imagination: they are objects whose existence is certain but whose nature is unknown, valuable beyond ordinary reckoning yet impossible to buy or sell in their current state of disappearance. The Alexander III Commemorative Egg of 1910 is, among the lost eggs, perhaps the most thoroughly unknown — a name attached to a void. Its significance lies not only in what it was, as an object of extraordinary craftsmanship honouring a significant historical figure, but in what its absence represents: the irreversible destruction of cultural patrimony that accompanied the collapse of the Romanov dynasty and the early decades of Soviet rule.

Researchers, dealers, and institutions continue to monitor the market and the archival record for any evidence that might shed light on the egg's fate. The opening of Soviet-era archives, which has proceeded unevenly since the 1990s, has occasionally yielded new documentation relevant to the Imperial collection, and further discoveries remain possible. Until such evidence emerges, the Alexander III Commemorative Egg of 1910 remains one of the most consequential missing objects in the history of jewellery and decorative art.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — Fabergé and the Imperial Collection