The Kelch Twelve Panel Egg, made by the firm of Carl Fabergé in 1899, is the second of seven Easter eggs commissioned from the firm by the Saint Petersburg industrialist Alexander Ferdinandovich Kelch for his wife Barbara. Among Fabergé scholars and the wider trade it is generally regarded as the most successful of the Kelch eggs and as a peer to many of the Imperial commissions of the same years.

Design

The egg's body is divided by chased gold trellis-work into twelve panels, each enamelled in translucent strawberry pink over an engine-turned ground. The trellis is set with rose-cut diamonds at each intersection, and the egg is encircled by garlands of varicoloured gold rendering pink and yellow rose blossoms with green-gold leaves. The base and finial are diamond-set, and a portrait diamond crowns the upper pole. The visual effect is intricate and disciplined: the twelve identical panels give a sense of order, while the floral garlands and diamond-set trellis introduce richness without excess.

Workmanship

The egg was produced in Mikhail Perchin's workshop, the same workshop responsible for many of the finest Imperial eggs of the period. The enamel work is exemplary even by Fabergé's standards: translucent strawberry pink is one of the most demanding colours in the firm's palette because thickness variations show as colour shifts, and the twelve panels of the egg are remarkably uniform. The precision of the trellis-work and the consistency of the garland modelling testify to the workshop's mature command of its repertoire by the late 1890s.

Surprise

The original surprise is recorded as a watch or miniature timepiece set within the egg, although as with several non-Imperial pieces the surprise has not been continuously documented and current presentations may not include it. Loss or substitution of surprises is a recurring difficulty in the study of Kelch eggs, since their court documentation was less systematic than that of the Imperial gifts.

Provenance

The Kelch eggs were dispersed through international dealers in the 1920s after the collapse of the family's business in the wake of the Russian Revolution. The Twelve Panel Egg passed through several private collections in the twentieth century and is now held in the Royal Collection of the United Kingdom. Its presence in that collection makes it one of the more publicly accessible Kelch eggs, with periodic display at exhibitions of Royal Collection holdings.

Critical reception

The egg is repeatedly cited in Fabergé literature as evidence that the firm's most refined production was not reserved for the Imperial court. Kenneth Snowman's The Art of Carl Fabergé places it in the front rank of late nineteenth-century Fabergé output, and subsequent scholarship by Geza von Habsburg and others has reinforced this view. For students of the firm it offers a useful corrective to the common assumption that Imperial provenance is the principal determinant of quality; it is not.

Place in the Kelch series

Within the seven Kelch eggs the Twelve Panel sits between the comparatively conservative Hen Egg of 1898 and the increasingly elaborate later pieces. It marks the point at which the series found its own visual identity, distinct from the Imperial commissions, and it remains the egg most often used to introduce general audiences to the Kelch group.