The Cherub with Chariot Egg of 1888 is among the most tantalising absences in the history of decorative arts — an Imperial Fabergé egg documented in the workshop records of the House of Fabergé yet physically unaccounted for since the upheavals of the Russian Revolution. Commissioned by Tsar Alexander III as an Easter gift for his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna, the egg is described in archival sources as a gold object whose surprise — the concealed interior mechanism that was the defining conceit of every Imperial egg — featured a cherub pulling a chariot. It belongs to the group of eight Imperial eggs now classified as lost, a category that distinguishes them from the forty-three surviving Imperial eggs and from the larger corpus of Fabergé eggs made for private clients. The 1888 egg's disappearance is both a scholarly puzzle and a standing invitation to collectors, auction houses, and institutions worldwide.

The Imperial Easter Egg Commission

The tradition of presenting jewelled Easter eggs to the Empress began in 1885, when Alexander III ordered from Carl Fabergé a gold egg enamelled in white, concealing a golden yolk within which sat a golden hen — itself containing a miniature imperial crown and a ruby pendant. The gift so delighted Maria Feodorovna that Alexander commissioned a new egg each year thereafter, with the sole stipulation that each must contain a surprise. This annual commission continued under Nicholas II after Alexander's death in 1894, eventually extending to gifts for the Dowager Empress and for Alexandra Feodorovna. The programme produced some fifty Imperial eggs in total, of which the workshop records, cross-referenced with imperial household accounts and later Soviet inventories, allow scholars to reconstruct a reasonably confident census.

The Cherub with Chariot Egg falls in the middle period of Alexander III's commissions — the fourth year of what would become a decade-long series under his patronage. By 1888 the workshop of Henrik Wigström and the chief workmaster Mikhail Perkhin were already established as the primary hands behind the Imperial eggs, though precise attribution of individual pieces from this era remains complicated by incomplete workshop documentation. The egg's position in the sequence — following the Hen with Sapphire Pendant Egg (1886) and the Serpent Clock Egg (1887) — places it in a phase when Fabergé was still exploring the formal vocabulary of the surprise, before the more architecturally ambitious conceits of the 1890s.

What the Archives Record

The primary documentary evidence for the Cherub with Chariot Egg derives from the ledgers and order books associated with the House of Fabergé, as well as from the inventories compiled by Soviet authorities following the nationalisation of imperial property after 1917. These sources, examined and cross-referenced by Fabergé scholars including Tatiana Fabergé, Lynette Proler, and Valentin Skurlov in their foundational catalogue work, confirm the egg's existence and its general character without providing the granular physical description that would allow confident identification were the object to surface today.

What can be stated with reasonable confidence is the following:

• The egg was delivered to Alexander III in time for Easter 1888, consistent with the annual gifting pattern.
• It was fashioned in gold — the standard material for the Imperial series — and incorporated a surprise depicting a cherub with a chariot, most likely a miniature automaton or sculptural group in the Neoclassical taste that pervaded Fabergé's work of the period.
• No detailed description of its enamel colour, stone set, dimensions, or precise mechanism survives in currently accessible archival sources.
• The egg does not appear in the 1922 Soviet inventory of Fabergé objects held at the Kremlin Armoury, nor in the records of the Antikvariat, the Soviet state body that sold confiscated imperial treasures to Western buyers during the 1920s and 1930s.

The absence from Antikvariat records is significant but not conclusive. Several Imperial eggs passed through private hands during and immediately after the Revolution, bypassing formal state channels entirely. Others were broken up for their component materials — gold, enamel, and stones — by parties who did not recognise or did not value their provenance. Either fate is plausible for the 1888 egg.

The Cherub and Chariot Motif in Context

The imagery of a cherub — a putto in the Italian tradition, or an amour in the French — pulling a chariot was a well-established decorative conceit by the late nineteenth century, rooted in Neoclassical and Empire-period ornament. It carried associations with triumph, with the passage of time (the chariot as vehicle of the sun), and with playful allegory. In the context of an Easter gift, the motif may have carried additional resonance: the chariot as a vehicle of resurrection or renewal, the cherub as a messenger figure. Whether Fabergé's craftsmen intended such readings or simply drew on a fashionable decorative vocabulary cannot be determined from surviving evidence.

Comparable motifs appear in Fabergé's non-egg production — small gold and enamel objects, desk pieces, and cigarette cases of the period occasionally feature putti in various attitudes — and in the broader European goldsmith tradition from which Fabergé drew. The Neoclassical tendency in the 1888 egg's described subject is consistent with the stylistic range of the Imperial eggs of the late 1880s, which drew variously on Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical sources before the more explicitly Russian nationalist and Art Nouveau inflections of the 1890s and 1900s.

Fate and Disappearance

The Imperial Easter eggs were kept at the Winter Palace and at other imperial residences. Following the February Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Bolshevik seizure of power, imperial property was confiscated and inventoried in stages. The process was neither systematic nor complete: in the chaos of 1917–1921, objects were removed by palace staff, by soldiers, by opportunistic individuals, and by organised looting. Some eggs were hidden by loyalists; others were taken as personal property by those who had access to the palaces.

The Soviet state, recognising the foreign-currency value of Fabergé objects, sold a substantial number through the Antikvariat to Western dealers and collectors during the 1920s and 1930s. Armand Hammer, the American businessman, was among the most prominent buyers, and several eggs entered major American collections through this channel. The eggs that did not pass through Antikvariat — including, apparently, the Cherub with Chariot Egg — either remained in Soviet institutional collections (where they would eventually have been identified) or were lost, destroyed, or dispersed through informal channels before the state inventory could capture them.

The scholarly consensus, as reflected in the standard Fabergé catalogues, is that the 1888 egg is genuinely lost rather than merely misattributed or held under an unrecognised identity in a known collection. The possibility that it survives in an unidentified private collection — purchased at some point in the twentieth century without its Imperial provenance being recognised — cannot be excluded, and it is this possibility that sustains the periodic rumours and claims that attend all the lost Imperial eggs.

The Eight Lost Imperial Eggs

The Cherub with Chariot Egg is one of eight Imperial eggs currently classified as lost. The others in this group include the 1886 Hen with Sapphire Pendant Egg, the 1888 Cherub with Chariot Egg itself, the 1889 Necessaire Egg, the 1897 Mauve Egg, the 1902 Empire Nephrite Egg, the 1903 Royal Danish Egg, the 1909 Alexander III Commemorative Egg, and the 1915 Military Egg — though the precise composition of the lost group has been subject to revision as scholarship advances and as eggs occasionally surface. (The 2014 identification of the Third Imperial Egg of 1887 in a scrap-metal dealer's possession in the American Midwest demonstrated that such discoveries remain possible.)

The 2014 discovery — in which an egg purchased for a modest sum at a Midwestern antiques fair was identified by a specialist as the missing Third Imperial Egg — briefly reinvigorated public interest in the lost eggs and prompted renewed scrutiny of auction catalogues, estate sales, and private collections. No comparable identification has since been made for the 1888 egg, but the episode confirmed that the lost Imperial eggs should be regarded as potentially recoverable rather than certainly destroyed.

Scholarly and Market Status

In the scholarly literature, the Cherub with Chariot Egg is treated primarily as a documentary object — known through records rather than through physical examination. The standard reference works on Fabergé, including the catalogue Fabergé: Imperial Eggs and Other Fantasies by Snowman, and the more recent comprehensive scholarship by Tatiana Fabergé and colleagues, list it among the lost eggs with the caveat that physical description is necessarily incomplete.

Were the egg to surface today, its authentication would require the concurrence of leading Fabergé specialists and, in all likelihood, examination by a major institution such as the Fabergé Museum in St Petersburg or the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which holds one of the largest Imperial egg collections outside Russia. The market value of a confirmed lost Imperial egg would be extraordinary: the record for a Fabergé Imperial egg at auction stands at approximately £9 million (Rothschild Egg, Christie's London, 2007), and a newly discovered lost egg — particularly one with a well-documented Imperial provenance — would almost certainly exceed that figure substantially.

The legal status of any recovered Imperial egg would also be complex. Russia has at various times asserted claims over Imperial property dispersed after 1917, and any sale or transfer of a recovered egg would likely involve careful legal scrutiny of the chain of title. These considerations have not diminished collector interest; if anything, the combination of historical significance, aesthetic rarity, and legal complexity has made the lost Imperial eggs among the most discussed objects in the decorative arts market.

Significance in the History of Decorative Arts

The Cherub with Chariot Egg occupies a particular place in the Fabergé narrative not because of any documented aesthetic achievement — its appearance, after all, is unknown — but because its absence is itself historically meaningful. The loss of eight Imperial eggs is a direct consequence of one of the twentieth century's most violent political ruptures, and each missing egg is, in a sense, a material record of that rupture. The eggs that survive do so largely because they were sold, gifted, or smuggled out of Russia before the Soviet consolidation of imperial property; the eggs that are lost were not.

In this respect, the 1888 egg is not merely a missing object but a document of historical contingency — of the ways in which political catastrophe reshapes the material record of culture. Its cherub and chariot, whatever their precise form, were made for a world that ceased to exist within three decades of their creation. The egg was a gift between a tsar and an empress, an object of private devotion and dynastic ritual, and it vanished along with the dynasty that gave it meaning. That vanishing is, in its own way, as eloquent as any surviving masterwork.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — Fabergé Imperial Eggs (Spring 2015)
• Fabergé Museum, St Petersburg — official collection and research resources