The Colonnade Egg of 1910 is one of the most architecturally ambitious objects produced by the St Petersburg workshop of Peter Carl Fabergé, and stands among the finest surviving examples of the Imperial Easter Egg series commissioned by the Romanov court. Presented by Tsar Nicholas II to his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, at Easter 1910, the egg takes the form of a miniature neoclassical rotunda or temple — a pink-enamelled pavilion supported by rose-diamond-set columns — with a clock face at its centre. Its original surprise, believed to have been a mechanical cherub, is now lost. The Colonnade Egg has been part of the British Royal Collection since 1931, when it was acquired by Queen Mary, and it is today held and displayed by the Royal Collection Trust.

Historical Context: The Imperial Easter Egg Tradition

The practice of commissioning elaborate jewelled Easter eggs for the Russian Imperial family began in 1885, when Tsar Alexander III presented the first Fabergé egg to his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna — the same woman who would, a quarter-century later, receive the Colonnade Egg from her son. The tradition continued under Nicholas II, who maintained two annual commissions: one egg for his mother and one for his wife, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. By the time the Colonnade Egg was delivered, Fabergé's workshops had refined the Imperial series into a programme of extraordinary ambition, each egg required to contain a hidden surprise and to surpass its predecessors in technical and artistic invention.

The year 1910 placed the commission at the height of Fabergé's creative powers and at a moment of relative political stability before the upheavals that would ultimately destroy the dynasty. The egg was the work of the head workmaster Henrik Wigström, who had succeeded the celebrated Michael Perchin upon the latter's death in 1903. Wigström's tenure is associated with a cooler, more architecturally disciplined aesthetic than Perchin's exuberant rococo sensibility, and the Colonnade Egg exemplifies this shift with particular clarity.

Description and Materials

The Colonnade Egg is constructed primarily of bowenite — a pale, translucent variety of serpentine with a soft apple-green to greyish tone — overlaid with translucent pink enamel applied over a guilloché-engraved gold ground. The combination produces a surface of considerable luminosity, the enamel appearing to glow from within when held to the light. The overall form is that of a classical rotunda: a domed upper section supported by a colonnade of six columns, each set with rose-cut diamonds mounted in platinum and gold.

At the centre of the structure, where the interior of the rotunda would be, sits a clock face. The dial is enamelled in white and set with Roman numerals, the hands fashioned in gold. The clock mechanism is functional, making the Colonnade Egg one of the horological objects within the Imperial series — a category that includes the celebrated Kelch Chanticleer Egg and the Rothschild Egg. The movement is wound and regulated through concealed apertures consistent with Fabergé's characteristic attention to the seamless integration of mechanical function within decorative form.

The base of the egg is a stepped plinth of bowenite, again enamelled in pink, which anchors the composition and gives it the weight and gravitas of a piece of monumental architecture rendered in miniature. Decorative swags, festoons, and applied gold mounts in the neoclassical vocabulary — husks, ribbons, and acanthus — articulate the transitions between architectural elements. The overall palette of pink, white, and gold is consistent with the Louis XVI revival taste that characterised much of Fabergé's output in the first decade of the twentieth century.

The Lost Surprise

Every Imperial Easter Egg was required, by the terms of the commission, to contain a hidden surprise — a secondary object of independent artistic merit concealed within or beneath the egg itself. In the case of the Colonnade Egg, the surprise is documented in period sources as a mechanical cherub, almost certainly a small automaton of the kind Fabergé's workshops produced with considerable skill. The cherub is believed to have been a reference to the children of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna, a theme that appears in several eggs of this period, most notably the 1906 Moscow Kremlin Egg and the series of portrait miniature eggs.

The surprise did not survive with the egg and its whereabouts are unknown. Whether it was separated from the egg before or after the Revolution of 1917, during the dispersal of Imperial property by the Soviet government in the 1920s and 1930s, or at some later point in the object's history, cannot be established with certainty. The loss is significant not only for the completeness of the object but because the surprise would have provided additional biographical and dynastic information about the egg's intended meaning.

Provenance: From the Winter Palace to Windsor

The Colonnade Egg remained in the possession of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna until the Revolution. Following the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917 and the subsequent Bolshevik seizure of power, the Imperial collections were nationalised. Maria Feodorovna herself escaped Russia in 1919 aboard a British warship, HMS Marlborough, at the insistence of her nephew King George V, and lived out her remaining years in her native Denmark, dying in 1928.

The Soviet government, under acute financial pressure during the late 1920s and early 1930s, authorised the sale of significant portions of the nationalised Imperial collections through a series of transactions managed largely by the state export agency Antikvariat. It was through this channel, or through the dispersal of property that had accompanied Maria Feodorovna into exile, that the Colonnade Egg entered the market. In 1931, Queen Mary — consort of King George V and one of the most systematic royal collectors of the twentieth century — acquired the Colonnade Egg. Queen Mary's interest in Fabergé was well documented; she assembled a substantial group of objects by the firm, many of which remain in the Royal Collection.

The egg passed, as part of the Royal Collection, to subsequent sovereigns and is today held by the Royal Collection Trust, the charitable organisation that manages the works of art owned by the Crown. It is periodically displayed at the Royal Collection Trust's exhibition spaces and has appeared in major loan exhibitions devoted to Fabergé and to the decorative arts of the Belle Époque.

Artistic Significance and Stylistic Placement

The Colonnade Egg occupies a distinctive position within the Imperial series because of the degree to which its design is governed by architectural, rather than purely jewellery, logic. Where many Fabergé eggs derive their form from the egg shape itself — treating it as a jewel box, a locket, or a reliquary — the Colonnade Egg subordinates the egg form almost entirely to the conceit of the temple or rotunda. The egg is, in effect, a building.

This architectural ambition places the Colonnade Egg in dialogue with a small number of other eggs in the series that adopt similarly monumental conceits, including the 1900 Trans-Siberian Railway Egg and the 1908 Alexander Palace Egg. The neoclassical vocabulary — the colonnade, the dome, the stepped plinth, the applied swags — reflects the broader revival of eighteenth-century French decorative arts that swept European luxury production in the years around 1900 and found particular favour among the aristocratic and royal clientele of Fabergé's St Petersburg and London branches.

The choice of bowenite as the primary structural material is also noteworthy. Fabergé's workshops used a range of hardstones — nephrite, rhodonite, obsidian, agate — for structural and decorative purposes, and bowenite appears in a number of objects from the period. Its semi-translucency makes it particularly responsive to the overlaid enamel, which in the Colonnade Egg achieves an effect closer to the luminosity of a precious stone than to the opacity of an opaque enamel ground.

Technical Craftsmanship

The construction of the Colonnade Egg required the integration of skills from several distinct specialisms within Fabergé's workshop system. The guilloché engine-turning of the gold ground beneath the enamel — producing the fine wave or sunburst patterns that give translucent Fabergé enamel its characteristic depth — was carried out by specialist turners working on rose engines of Swiss and German manufacture. The enamelling itself, applied in multiple firings to achieve the precise depth of colour and the flawless surface that Fabergé demanded, was the work of enamel painters whose craft was among the most technically exacting in the decorative arts.

The diamond-set columns required the skills of a stone-setter working in the platinum-dominant style that had become standard for diamond mounting in the first decade of the twentieth century, following the wider adoption of platinum as a setting metal after approximately 1900. The clock movement, almost certainly of Swiss manufacture to Fabergé's specification, was fitted and regulated by the workshop's horological specialists. The integration of all these elements into a coherent whole — architecturally resolved, mechanically functional, and gemologically precise — is the achievement that makes the Colonnade Egg an object of sustained scholarly and connoisseurial interest.

The Colonnade Egg in the Context of the Imperial Series

Of the approximately fifty Imperial Easter Eggs known to have been produced between 1885 and 1916, forty-three survive. The Colonnade Egg is among the better-documented survivors, its provenance being traceable with reasonable confidence from the Imperial court through the dispersal of the 1920s and 1930s to the Royal Collection. Its survival in a major institutional collection — with the attendant benefits of conservation, documentation, and scholarly access — has made it one of the more thoroughly studied objects in the series.

The egg's relationship to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna is particularly resonant. She was the original recipient of the very first Imperial Easter Egg in 1885, and the Colonnade Egg of 1910 was one of the last she received before the catastrophe of the Revolution ended the tradition. The arc of her life — from the glittering court of Alexander III to exile in Denmark — is in some sense inscribed in the history of the objects she received and, in many cases, lost.

In the Trade and at Auction

The Colonnade Egg is not available on the open market, being a permanent part of the Royal Collection and therefore not subject to sale. Its significance to the auction market is nonetheless considerable, as it serves as a reference point for the valuation of other Fabergé objects of comparable ambition and provenance. Imperial Easter Eggs that have appeared at auction in recent decades — including the Rothschild Egg, which sold at Christie's London in 2007 for approximately £8.98 million, and the Third Imperial Egg, which was identified and sold privately in 2014 for a reported sum in the region of $33 million — are routinely assessed in relation to the benchmark established by the known Royal Collection and Kremlin Armoury holdings.

For collectors and dealers in Fabergé, the Colonnade Egg's presence in the Royal Collection functions as a kind of canonical standard: an object whose authenticity, condition, and provenance are beyond question, against which other attributions and valuations may be measured.

Further Reading

• Royal Collection Trust: The Colonnade Egg
• GIA Gems & Gemology: Fabergé Eggs