The Bay Tree Egg — also known as the Orange Tree Egg — is one of the most technically ambitious of the fifty Imperial Easter Eggs produced by the House of Fabergé for the Russian Imperial family between 1885 and 1916. Presented in 1911 by Tsar Nicholas II to his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, the egg belongs to a distinguished lineage of automaton-surprise eggs in which the principal wonder is not a static jewelled object but a living mechanical performance. Executed under the direction of workmaster Henrik Wigström, the piece combines nephrite carving, gold smithing, diamond and citrine setting, and a sophisticated clockwork mechanism into a single unified object of extraordinary refinement. It is currently held by the Edouard and Maurice Sandoz Foundation in Lausanne, Switzerland, where it remains one of the most celebrated objects in that collection.

Historical and Dynastic Context

From 1885 onwards, Tsar Alexander III established the tradition of commissioning an Easter egg from the St Petersburg firm of Peter Carl Fabergé as a gift for his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna. Upon Alexander III's death in 1894, his son Nicholas II continued and expanded the tradition, presenting eggs to both his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, and his mother, the Dowager Empress. The years between 1900 and 1913 represent the creative and technical zenith of the Imperial series, a period during which Fabergé's workshops produced eggs of escalating complexity and ambition. The Bay Tree Egg of 1911 sits squarely within this golden period.

Maria Feodorovna, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark, was a woman of considerable aesthetic discernment and personal warmth. Her relationship with her son Nicholas was close, and the annual Easter gift was an expression of filial devotion as much as Imperial munificence. The eggs presented to the Dowager Empress over the years reflect a particular sensitivity to her tastes: she favoured objects with wit, movement, and botanical or natural imagery. The Bay Tree Egg, with its miniature living garden and its hidden singing bird, may be read as a perfect distillation of those preferences.

Description: The Tree and Its Tub

The egg takes the form of a small ornamental bay tree — or, in some descriptions, an orange tree, which accounts for the alternative name — set in a white nephrite tub of octagonal form. The tub rests on a gold base of Louis XVI character, decorated with swags and classical ornament in the manner typical of Wigström's workshop during this period. The nephrite used for the tub is of the pale, slightly milky variety associated with Siberian and Chinese sources, and its smooth, cool surface provides an effective visual counterpoint to the warm gold and the glittering canopy above.

The trunk and branches of the tree are fashioned from gold, worked to suggest the texture of bark with considerable naturalistic skill. The foliage consists of a dense canopy of individually set gold leaves, each one cut and chased to suggest the ovate form of a bay or citrus leaf. Set among the leaves are small round citrines of warm yellow-orange tone, representing the fruit of the tree. These stones are modest in individual size but numerous, and their collective effect — a shower of warm amber light among the gold-green foliage — is one of the most charming aspects of the object. Interspersed throughout the canopy are rose-cut and brilliant-cut diamonds, which catch and scatter light and lend the tree an almost supernatural luminosity when seen under strong illumination.

The overall composition is one of contained exuberance: the tree is small enough to hold in two hands, yet dense with detail and material richness. It belongs to a tradition of jewelled automaton trees that extends back to the great goldsmiths of the Renaissance and the elaborate Kunstkammer objects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Fabergé's craftsmen were certainly aware of that lineage.

The Surprise: A Mechanical Singing Bird

The defining feature of the Bay Tree Egg — and the element that elevates it from a superb piece of decorative art into something approaching a feat of engineering — is its concealed automaton. When a small pearl button set into the base of the tub is pressed, a section of the canopy opens and a tiny mechanical singing bird rises from within the foliage. The bird spreads and flaps its wings, opens its beak, turns its head, and produces a clear, sustained song before descending once more and allowing the canopy to close over it.

The mechanism required to achieve this performance is of watchmaking complexity. The bird itself is feathered with actual plumage — a technique common to the finest European automaton birds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most famously those produced by the Jaquet-Droz family and later by the Geneva firm of Bruguier. The song is produced by a miniature bellows-and-whistle system driven by a wound spring, and the movements of the wings, head, and beak are coordinated by a series of cams and levers of extraordinary delicacy. The entire mechanism must be wound and reset, and it has survived in working order — a testament to both the quality of its original construction and the care with which it has been maintained.

Automaton singing birds had been a luxury commodity in Europe since at least the eighteenth century, and Fabergé's workshops had incorporated similar mechanisms into earlier eggs, most notably the Rothschild Egg of 1902 (a clock egg with a crowing cockerel, sold at Christie's in 2007 for a then-record price). The Bay Tree Egg's bird, however, is distinguished by the theatrical quality of its presentation: the concealment within the canopy, the slow revelation as the foliage parts, and the bird's ascent all contribute to a sense of genuine surprise and delight that mere technical description cannot fully convey.

Workmaster Henrik Wigström

The Bay Tree Egg was executed under the direction of Henrik Wigström (1862–1923), who served as head workmaster of Fabergé's St Petersburg workshop from 1903 until the firm's closure in 1917. Wigström succeeded the celebrated Michael Perchin in that role and is responsible for a substantial proportion of the finest Imperial Eggs produced in the twentieth century. His personal style favoured the neoclassical idiom — swags, laurel borders, guillochéd enamel, and Louis XVI ornamental vocabulary — and his technical standards were exceptionally high.

Wigström's workshop was responsible for the physical fabrication of the egg, including the nephrite tub, the gold tree, and the setting of the stones. The automaton mechanism itself was almost certainly produced by specialist clockmakers working in collaboration with Fabergé, as was standard practice for pieces of this complexity. The integration of the mechanism with the decorative elements — ensuring that the bird's emergence does not disrupt the visual integrity of the canopy — required close co-ordination between the lapidary, goldsmithing, and horological craftsmen involved.

Materials and Gemstones

The principal gemological interest of the Bay Tree Egg lies in the ensemble use of materials rather than in any single exceptional stone. The citrines representing fruit are of a warm, saturated yellow-orange tone, consistent with heat-treated amethyst or natural citrine from Brazilian or Siberian sources, both of which were available to St Petersburg jewellers in the early twentieth century. They are set in closed or partially closed gold collets that enhance their colour by reflecting warm light back through the stones.

The diamonds scattered through the canopy are predominantly rose-cut and old European brilliant-cut stones of the type in common use in Russian Imperial jewellery of the period. They are not individually remarkable, but their distribution through the foliage is carefully considered: they appear where light would naturally catch dew or highlight the upper surface of a leaf, and the effect is one of naturalistic sparkle rather than formal display.

The nephrite of the tub deserves particular mention. Nephrite — the calcium-magnesium silicate member of the amphibole group, distinct from jadeite — was a favoured material in Fabergé's workshops, used extensively for bases, frames, and decorative objects. The pale, slightly translucent variety used here is sometimes described as Siberian nephrite, though nephrite of similar character was also imported from Chinese Turkestan. Its smooth, cool surface and restrained colour make it an ideal foil for the warm gold and glittering stones of the tree above.

Provenance and Current Location

The Bay Tree Egg remained in the possession of the Romanov family until the Revolution of 1917. Like many Imperial Eggs, it passed through the hands of the Soviet state, which sold numerous Fabergé objects through various channels during the 1920s and 1930s as part of broader programmes to liquidate Imperial assets for foreign currency. The egg eventually entered the collection of Edouard de Sandoz, a Swiss collector of considerable means and refined taste, and it has remained with the Edouard and Maurice Sandoz Foundation in Lausanne ever since.

The Sandoz Foundation holds one of the most significant private collections of Fabergé objects outside Russia, and the Bay Tree Egg is among its most prized possessions. The Foundation has made the egg available for major Fabergé exhibitions over the decades, and it has been extensively studied and published by scholars including Géza von Habsburg, the foremost academic authority on Fabergé's Imperial Eggs.

Unlike several of the Imperial Eggs that passed through the Soviet sales and subsequently entered American private collections — most famously those acquired by Malcolm Forbes and later purchased by Viktor Vekselberg for the Fabergé Museum in St Petersburg — the Bay Tree Egg has remained in European institutional hands, and its provenance is among the most clearly documented of the series.

Place Within the Imperial Egg Series

The Bay Tree Egg occupies a distinctive position within the Imperial series by virtue of its combination of botanical naturalism and mechanical complexity. It is one of several eggs in which the surprise is an automaton rather than a static miniature or jewelled object: others in this category include the Peacock Egg of 1908 (Fabergé Museum, St Petersburg), which contains a full-scale mechanical peacock, and the aforementioned Rothschild Egg. The Bay Tree Egg is perhaps the most intimate of these automaton eggs — its scale is domestic rather than theatrical, and the singing bird's emergence from the canopy has the quality of a private enchantment rather than a public spectacle.

The year 1911 was, by any measure, a productive one for Fabergé's Imperial commissions. The egg presented to Alexandra Feodorovna that year was the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg, a more conventional piece decorated with miniature portraits and commemorative imagery. The Bay Tree Egg, by contrast, is entirely without personal or dynastic reference: it is a pure object of delight, and its appeal is as immediate today as it must have been when Maria Feodorovna first pressed the pearl button and watched the bird rise from its golden garden.

Conservation and Condition

The Bay Tree Egg is reported to be in excellent condition, with its automaton mechanism still functional. The maintenance of a working automaton of this age and complexity is a significant conservation achievement, requiring periodic attention from specialist horological conservators. The nephrite tub shows no significant damage, and the stone-set canopy retains its original stones without evident loss — a circumstance that reflects both the quality of the original setting and the care of successive custodians.

The survival of the mechanism in working order is particularly noteworthy given the fragility of the bellows and whistle components, which in lesser automata of comparable age have frequently deteriorated beyond repair. That the bird still sings is, in its own small way, a kind of miracle of craft and stewardship.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology: Fabergé Imperial Eggs (gia.edu)
• Fabergé Museum, St Petersburg — Imperial Eggs Collection