The Kelch Hen Egg, made by the firm of Carl Fabergé in 1898, is the first of seven Easter eggs commissioned by the Saint Petersburg industrialist Alexander Ferdinandovich Kelch for his wife Barbara, also known as Varvara Bazanova-Kelch. The egg is a deliberate echo of the Hen Egg of 1885, the very first of the Imperial Fabergé eggs presented by Tsar Alexander III to the Empress Maria Feodorovna.

Design and construction

The Kelch Hen Egg follows the Imperial precedent closely while introducing a more elaborate decorative scheme. The outer shell is enamelled in opaque white over an engine-turned ground, simulating the surface of a real eggshell. The shell opens to reveal an interior worked in matte yellow enamel suggesting the yolk, which in turn opens to reveal a varicoloured gold hen with rose-cut diamond eyes. The hen itself is hinged so that it can be opened to reveal the original surprise. The construction is the work of the Saint Petersburg workshops under workmaster Mikhail Perchin, whose mark appears on the piece.

The original surprise and its loss

The earliest descriptions indicate that the hen contained a small heart-shaped frame of varicoloured gold and rose-cut diamonds set with a portrait miniature, in the manner of contemporaneous Imperial commissions. Whether this surprise survived the dispersal of the Kelch collection after 1917 is a matter of debate in Fabergé scholarship. The current state of the egg, as recorded in published catalogues and exhibition documentation, lacks the original surprise, and the published photographs typically show only the egg, yolk, and hen.

Relation to the Imperial Hen Egg

The Imperial Hen Egg of 1885 was a comparatively modest object made early in Fabergé's relationship with the court. By 1898 the firm's range had expanded considerably, and the Kelch Hen Egg can be read as a self-conscious reprise demonstrating, on a more lavish budget, what Fabergé could now do with the same conceit. The diamond setting is more generous, the enamel work more refined, and the proportions slightly enlarged. Both eggs nevertheless share the Russian folk-art reference of a coloured Easter egg containing a hen, a tradition older than either piece.

Provenance

The Kelch family business collapsed in the years preceding and following the Russian Revolution, and the eggs were sold abroad in the 1920s. Several passed through Morgan, the Paris dealer, and into European and American collections. The Hen Egg's later twentieth-century history is documented in Fabergé exhibition catalogues, and it is currently in a major private collection. It has been shown at travelling exhibitions including those mounted by the Fabergé Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Significance

For the trade and for collectors, the Kelch Hen Egg is significant on two grounds. First, it confirms that wealthy non-Imperial clients of Fabergé could obtain work of nearly Imperial quality. Second, it demonstrates how Fabergé reused and refined his own ideas across a quarter-century of egg production, treating each commission as an occasion to revisit and improve on earlier solutions. Kenneth Snowman's monograph and the more recent scholarship of Geza von Habsburg remain the principal references for the egg.