The Fifteenth Anniversary Egg is an Imperial Easter egg created by the House of Fabergé and presented by Tsar Nicholas II to his wife, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, at Easter 1911. The gift marked the fifteenth anniversary of Nicholas's coronation, which had taken place in Moscow on 26 May 1896. Fashioned in gold and platinum, enriched with rose-cut and old-cut diamonds, and covered in translucent green enamel over an engraved ground, the egg ranks among the most overtly dynastic of the fifty Imperial eggs produced by Fabergé between 1885 and 1916. Its principal surprise — a series of miniature portrait panels depicting the five children of the Imperial couple — transforms the object from a jewelled curiosity into a document of Romanov family life at the height of the last reign. The egg is presently held in a private collection and has not been publicly exhibited in recent decades.

Historical Context: The Imperial Egg Commission

The tradition of presenting jewelled Easter eggs to the Tsarina was inaugurated by Alexander III, who gave the first Fabergé Imperial egg to his wife, Maria Feodorovna, in 1885. On Alexander's death in 1894, Nicholas II continued the practice, expanding it to encompass two eggs annually — one for his mother and one for Alexandra. The commission thus became a fixed ritual of the Russian court calendar, each egg conceived as a unique objet d'art whose theme was chosen in consultation with the Imperial family. By 1911, the House of Fabergé had been producing Imperial eggs for twenty-six years, and the workshop under head workmaster Henrik Wigström had refined its technical repertoire to an extraordinary degree.

The fifteenth anniversary of the coronation provided a natural commemorative occasion. Nicholas's coronation had been overshadowed by the Khodynka Tragedy of May 1896, in which a crowd stampede on the outskirts of Moscow killed more than a thousand people. By 1911, the court was inclined to mark the anniversary with dignified celebration rather than public spectacle, and a privately presented jewelled egg — intimate in scale, dynastic in content — was a fitting vehicle.

Description and Materials

The egg is constructed on a gold armature and finished in translucent green enamel applied over an engine-turned (guilloché) ground, a technique at which Fabergé's enamellers were without peer. The guilloché pattern beneath the enamel creates an optical depth that causes the colour to shift subtly as the object is rotated in the light — a characteristic effect of Fabergé's finest enamel work. The surface is further enriched with applied diamond-set mounts in platinum, a metal that Fabergé's workshops adopted with increasing frequency from the early 1900s onward, prizing its white colour and its ability to hold small stones without the yellow cast of gold settings.

The overall form follows the canonical ovoid shape of the Imperial series, mounted on a base and surmounted by a crown finial set with diamonds. The combination of green enamel and white metal gives the object a cool, formal palette quite distinct from the warmer gold-and-enamel tonalities of earlier eggs such as the Coronation Egg of 1897 or the Lilies of the Valley Egg of 1898.

The Surprise: Miniature Portraits of the Imperial Children

The defining feature of the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg — and the element that most directly explains its commemorative purpose — is its surprise: a series of miniature portrait panels depicting the five children of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna. These were, in order of birth, the Grand Duchesses Olga (born 1895), Tatiana (born 1897), Maria (born 1899), and Anastasia (born 1901), and the Tsarevich Alexei (born 1904). The miniatures are painted in watercolour on ivory, a medium standard to Fabergé's portrait work, and are set within the egg in a manner that allows them to be displayed as a unified dynastic group.

The inclusion of all five children, with Alexei — the haemophiliac heir whose health dominated the private life of the court — prominently among them, gives the surprise a particular emotional weight. In 1911, the Imperial family was still presenting a composed public face; the portraits record the children at ages ranging from approximately seven to sixteen, in the last years before the First World War would begin to unravel the Romanov world. As historical documents, the miniatures are of considerable interest to scholars of the period, providing dated likenesses in a medium of high technical quality.

The use of portrait miniatures as surprises was not unique to this egg — the Romanov Tercentenary Egg of 1913 similarly incorporated miniature likenesses of the dynasty — but the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg is unusual in concentrating exclusively on the immediate Imperial family rather than on a broader dynastic or historical programme.

Attribution and Workmanship

The egg is attributed to the workshop of Henrik Wigström, who served as Fabergé's head workmaster from 1903 until the firm's closure in 1917, succeeding Michael Perchin. Wigström's workshop was responsible for the majority of the Imperial eggs produced during Nicholas II's reign, and its output is characterised by a refined, somewhat restrained neoclassical elegance that distinguishes it from the more exuberant rococo tendencies of Perchin's earlier work. The platinum mounts and the cool green enamel of the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg are consistent with Wigström's aesthetic preferences as documented in surviving workshop records and in comparable pieces from the same period.

The miniature portraits would have been the work of a specialist miniaturist working in collaboration with the Fabergé atelier. The firm maintained relationships with a number of accomplished miniaturists in St Petersburg, and the quality of the portrait work in the Imperial eggs is consistently high, reflecting both the skill of the painters and the exacting standards imposed by the commission.

Provenance and Present Location

Like the majority of the Imperial Fabergé eggs, the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg passed out of Romanov possession following the Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Bolshevik seizure of Imperial property. The Soviet government, under the direction of the Antikvariat export agency, sold a number of Imperial eggs during the 1920s and 1930s to raise foreign currency, and several entered Western collections through dealers including Armand Hammer. The precise early post-revolutionary provenance of the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg is not fully documented in the public record.

The egg is presently recorded as being in a private collection. It has not appeared at public auction in the modern era of major Fabergé sales, which have included landmark results at Christie's and Sotheby's for other eggs in the Imperial series. Its absence from the public market means that no recent auction valuation exists, though comparable Imperial eggs — the Winter Egg sold at Christie's in 2002 for approximately $9.6 million, and the Rothschild Egg sold at Christie's in 2007 for £8.98 million — provide a general index of the category's value at the highest level.

The Egg Within the Imperial Series

Fifty Imperial eggs are recognised by scholars as having been completed and delivered; of these, forty-three are accounted for in known public and private collections, while seven remain unlocated. The Fifteenth Anniversary Egg is among the accounted-for group, though its private status limits scholarly access. The Imperial series as a whole is documented most authoritatively in the research of Géza von Habsburg and in the catalogue scholarship associated with major museum exhibitions, including those held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts — which holds one of the largest public collections of Fabergé Imperial eggs — and at the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow, which retains ten eggs acquired by the Soviet state.

Within the series, the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg occupies a position among the middle-period eggs of Nicholas II's reign — after the technically dazzling eggs of the late 1890s and early 1900s, and before the more sombre wartime eggs of 1915 and 1916. The year 1911 was a productive one for the Fabergé Imperial commission: the egg presented to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna that same year was the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg's counterpart in the dual annual commission, and together the two objects represent the workshop at a moment of confident, mature mastery.

Gemmological Notes

From a gemmological perspective, the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg is of interest primarily for its diamonds and its enamel rather than for coloured gemstones. The diamonds used in Fabergé's Imperial commissions were predominantly rose-cut and old European-cut stones of Russian and Indian origin, sourced through the St Petersburg trade. Fabergé's workshops did not prioritise large individual stones in the manner of, say, a Cartier parure; rather, diamonds were deployed as surface enrichment, their collective brilliance serving the overall decorative programme rather than drawing attention to individual specimens.

The translucent green enamel is the object's most technically distinguished material element. Fabergé's enamellers achieved their colours through the addition of metallic oxides to a base flux — chromium and copper compounds producing the greens — and the translucency of the finished enamel layer depended on precise control of firing temperature and enamel thickness. The guilloché ground beneath amplifies the optical effect by reflecting light back through the enamel from below. This technique, while not invented by Fabergé, was brought to its highest expression in the Imperial workshops, and the green enamel of the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg is considered among the finer examples of the colour in the series.

Cultural and Historical Significance

The Fifteenth Anniversary Egg belongs to a category of objects that transcend their material components to function as historical artefacts. The five children depicted in its miniature portraits — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei — were murdered at Yekaterinburg in July 1918, along with their parents and members of the household. The egg thus preserves likenesses of the Imperial children made seven years before their deaths, at a moment when the family's fate was entirely unforeseeable. This circumstance lends the object a retrospective poignancy that is inseparable from its reception in the modern period.

More broadly, the Imperial Fabergé eggs have come to serve as the pre-eminent material symbols of the Romanov dynasty and of the world that the Revolution destroyed. The Fifteenth Anniversary Egg, with its explicit dynastic content and its commemorative occasion, is among the most direct expressions of that symbolic function within the series. It is an object made to celebrate continuity and succession — the coronation anniversary, the living children, the dynasty's future — and it survives as a monument to the fragility of that confidence.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — Fabergé and the Imperial Easter Eggs
• Virginia Museum of Fine Arts — Fabergé Collection