The Hen Egg of 1885 — universally known in the literature as the Egg in Egg — stands as the founding object of the Imperial Fabergé Easter Egg series, the sequence of jewelled presentation pieces that Tsar Alexander III and, later, Nicholas II commissioned annually from the House of Fabergé for the Russian Imperial family. Modest in scale yet revolutionary in concept, it established the structural and philosophical template that would govern all fifty surviving Imperial eggs: an outer shell concealing a surprise within, the whole executed to a standard of craftsmanship that rendered the object simultaneously a toy, a reliquary, and a work of high jewellery art. Its influence on the decorative arts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is difficult to overstate, and its place in the history of goldsmithing is secure.

Historical Context and Commission

By the early 1880s, Peter Carl Fabergé had already transformed his father's St Petersburg workshop into one of the most technically accomplished goldsmithing establishments in Europe. His reputation rested on his revival of eighteenth-century French guillochage and enamel techniques, his mastery of hardstone carving, and his ability to synthesise historicist styles — Renaissance, Louis XVI, rococo — with a distinctly Russian sensibility. In 1882, Fabergé had attracted the personal attention of the Imperial court at the Pan-Russian Exhibition in Moscow, and by 1884 he held the title of Goldsmith to the Imperial Court.

The precise circumstances of the 1885 commission remain incompletely documented, but the scholarly consensus, supported by research published in Gems & Gemology and by the Fabergé Research Newsletter, holds that Tsar Alexander III ordered the egg as an Easter gift for his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna, a Danish princess who had grown up with the tradition of elaborate Easter gifts. The commission may have been inspired by a seventeenth-century ivory egg in the Danish Royal Collection at Rosenborg Castle, which itself contained a golden yolk, a golden hen, a miniature crown, and a tiny ring — a sequence of nested surprises that Fabergé's craftsmen adapted and elevated.

Description and Construction

The egg measures approximately 6.4 centimetres in height when closed. Its outer shell is fashioned from gold and covered in opaque white enamel, replicating with deliberate literalism the appearance of a hen's egg. The surface is smooth and undecorated — a studied restraint that sets it apart from virtually every subsequent Imperial egg and that gives the object an almost conceptual quality: it is, at first glance, simply an egg.

The shell opens along a horizontal seam at the equator to reveal a matte yellow-gold yolk. The yolk in turn opens to disclose a polychrome enamelled gold hen, rendered naturalistically with feathers suggested by chased and engraved detail and coloured with translucent and opaque enamels. The hen originally contained two further surprises: a miniature replica of the Imperial Crown in gold and diamonds, and a small ruby pendant egg. Both of these innermost surprises are now lost, and their precise appearance is known only from early inventory descriptions and from the analogy with the Rosenborg prototype.

The workmaster responsible for the egg's execution has not been definitively established in the published literature. Fabergé's workshop system assigned individual pieces to named workmasters — among them Erik Kollin, Michael Perchin, and Henrik Wigström — but the 1885 egg predates the period for which workshop records are most complete, and attribution to a specific hand remains a matter of scholarly discussion rather than settled fact.

The Surprise as Structural Principle

What the Egg in Egg established above all else was the surprise as the defining structural and experiential principle of the Imperial series. Each egg was required to contain something unexpected, something that rewarded the act of opening. This principle — borrowed from earlier European automata and boîtes à surprise, but here systematised into an annual ritual — gave the series its peculiar tension between exterior and interior, between the promise of the shell and the revelation of its contents.

In subsequent eggs, the surprise would evolve into extraordinary complexity: a fully functional miniature Trans-Siberian Railway locomotive in platinum and gold (the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg, 1900), a bouquet of lilies of the valley with portrait miniatures concealed within the blooms (the Lilies of the Valley Egg, 1898), a folding screen of miniature portraits (the Danish Palaces Egg, 1895). But the conceptual grammar of all of these — the nested revelation, the object within the object — was first articulated in 1885.

Materials and Technique

The white enamel of the outer shell is applied over a guilloché-engraved gold ground, a technique in which an engine-turning lathe cuts a precise geometric pattern into the metal surface before enamelling, creating an optical depth and luminosity in the finished enamel that a plain metal ground cannot achieve. In the Egg in Egg, the guilloché pattern is deliberately subtle — the enamel is opaque rather than translucent, so the underlying texture is felt rather than seen — but the technique is present and speaks to the workshop's insistence on technical correctness even where the effect is invisible to the casual observer.

The gold used throughout is yellow gold of high fineness, consistent with Russian goldsmithing practice of the period, which favoured higher-carat alloys than were common in Western European work of the same era. The enamelled hen demonstrates Fabergé's characteristic approach to polychrome enamel: colours are applied in thin, successive layers, each fired separately, to achieve a depth and saturation that single-layer application cannot produce.

Provenance and Present Location

The egg remained in Imperial possession until the Revolution of 1917, after which it passed into the hands of the Soviet state along with the rest of the Imperial collection. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet government sold significant portions of the Fabergé Imperial collection through various channels, including the dealer Armand Hammer and the auction house Christie's. The Egg in Egg was acquired by Matilda Geddings Gray, a Louisiana collector and philanthropist, and was bequeathed by her estate to the New Orleans Museum of Art, where it remains in the permanent collection and is on public display.

Its presence in a public museum collection distinguishes it from a number of other Imperial eggs that have passed through private hands, including the group of eggs purchased by the oligarch Viktor Vekselberg in 2004 from the Forbes Magazine Collection and now housed in the Fabergé Museum in St Petersburg. The Egg in Egg's institutional provenance has ensured that it has been consistently available to scholars and to the public, contributing to its status as the most thoroughly studied of all the Imperial eggs.

The Imperial Series in Broader Perspective

Between 1885 and 1916, Fabergé delivered fifty Imperial eggs to the Romanov court — forty-two for Alexander III and Nicholas II, plus a small number for other members of the Imperial family. Each was unique; each contained a surprise; each was presented on Easter morning in accordance with Russian Orthodox tradition. The series was interrupted by the First World War (two eggs commissioned for 1917 were never completed or delivered and were discovered only in 2014 in a private American collection) and terminated by the Revolution.

The Egg in Egg occupies a position of particular authority within this series not merely because it was first, but because its simplicity makes the underlying logic of the series most legible. Later eggs accumulated layers of iconographic complexity — dynastic symbolism, topographical references, portraiture, mechanical ingenuity — that can obscure the fundamental idea. The 1885 egg, with its white shell and its nested golden surprises, states that idea with the clarity of a first principle.

Scholarly and Market Significance

The study of Fabergé Imperial eggs is supported by a substantial scholarly literature. The foundational catalogue remains that compiled by A. Kenneth Snowman, whose work at Wartski in London gave him unparalleled access to primary sources and surviving objects. More recent scholarship, including research published by Géza von Habsburg and by the Fabergé Research Newsletter, has refined attributions, corrected provenance records, and in some cases identified previously unknown eggs. The discovery in 2014 of the so-called Third Imperial Easter Egg of 1887 in a scrap-metal dealer's stock in the American Midwest — subsequently authenticated and sold for a reported sum in the region of thirty-three million US dollars — demonstrated that the documentary record of the series remains incomplete and that significant objects may yet emerge.

In the auction market, Imperial Fabergé eggs command prices at the uppermost register of decorative arts sales. The Rothschild Egg, a presentation egg rather than an Imperial commission, sold at Christie's London in 2007 for approximately eighteen million pounds. Imperial eggs proper, when they appear at auction, have achieved prices in the tens of millions of dollars. The Egg in Egg, as a museum object, is not available on the market, but its status as the progenitor of the series would place it among the most significant objects in any hypothetical valuation exercise.

Legacy and Influence

The influence of the Egg in Egg and the Imperial series it inaugurated extends well beyond the decorative arts of the late Romanov period. The eggs were among the most widely reproduced luxury objects of the twentieth century, inspiring a global industry of licensed and unlicensed replicas ranging from serious goldsmithing commissions to mass-market souvenirs. The House of Fabergé, in its various post-revolutionary incarnations, has itself produced continuation eggs and presentation pieces in the tradition of the Imperial series.

More broadly, the Egg in Egg crystallised a set of ideas about luxury objects — the primacy of craftsmanship over material value, the importance of the hidden interior, the object as vehicle for narrative and sentiment — that remain central to the philosophy of high jewellery and the decorative arts. When contemporary jewellery houses speak of the surprise, the transformation, or the secret within a piece, they are, consciously or not, working within a tradition that the 1885 commission defined.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — Fabergé and the Imperial Easter Eggs
• GIA Research: Fabergé Eggs History