The Lilies of the Valley Egg is one of fifty Imperial Easter Eggs created by the House of Fabergé for the Russian Imperial Family between 1885 and 1916. Presented by Tsar Nicholas II to his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, at Easter 1898, the egg is among the most stylistically distinctive in the Imperial series, being the only Imperial Egg executed in a fully developed Art Nouveau idiom. It is held today in the Viktor Vekselberg Collection at the Fabergé Museum in St Petersburg.

Design and construction

The egg's body is gold, covered overall in translucent rose-pink guilloché enamel applied over an engine-turned wave pattern that produces a subtle silken shimmer. Rising from the base are four-cabriole gold legs in the form of stylised lily-of-the-valley stems, with green-enamelled leaves and pearl-set flowers ascending around the egg's circumference. The flowers themselves are constructed from oriental pearls, each set into a gold cup, with rose-cut diamond accents marking the throats. The mounting demonstrates the goldsmithing technique known as tremblant setting, in which the flowers are mounted on slender stems that quiver subtly when the piece is moved.

The surprise is contained within the upper body of the egg. A small button at the top, set with a rose-cut diamond and seed pearls, activates a mechanism that raises three miniature portraits on a fan-shaped support: Tsar Nicholas II in the centre, flanked by his eldest daughters Grand Duchess Olga and Grand Duchess Tatiana. The portraits, watercolour on ivory by court miniaturist Johannes Zehngraf, are set in rose-cut diamond frames and crowned by the Imperial cipher in diamonds. The mechanism is among the more elaborate of the Imperial series.

Workmasters and authorship

The egg is signed Fabergé and bears the workmaster's mark of Mikhail Perkhin, the senior workmaster at the firm's St Petersburg workshop and the master responsible for the majority of Imperial Eggs produced before his death in 1903. The miniatures are signed by Zehngraf. The egg's design is generally attributed to Fabergé's chief designer in this period, Franz Birbaum, though documentation of authorship within the firm is incomplete.

Stylistic significance

The Lilies of the Valley Egg's importance in the history of decorative arts lies partly in its date and partly in its style. Art Nouveau as a movement reached its peak in Western Europe between approximately 1895 and 1905, and Fabergé's adoption of its motifs in 1898 places this egg at the leading edge of stylistic development within Russian decorative art. The lily-of-the-valley itself is a quintessentially Art Nouveau motif, used extensively by René Lalique and by the Wiener Werkstätte. Within the Fabergé corpus, the egg is one of only a small handful that depart materially from the firm's predominant historicist and neoclassical idioms.

Maria Feodorovna's particular fondness for lilies-of-the-valley was well documented within the Imperial circle, and the choice of motif reflects the personal nature of the Easter gift. Several other Fabergé pieces commissioned for or by the Dowager Empress incorporate the same flower, including miniature flower studies in rock crystal vases now held at the Royal Collection.

Provenance

The egg passed into the possession of Maria Feodorovna and remained with her after her flight from Russia in 1919. Following her death in 1928 it entered the antiquities market and was acquired in 1933 by Armand Hammer's Hammer Galleries in New York. It subsequently passed through several private collections before being acquired by the Forbes family for the Forbes Magazine Collection. In February 2004 the entire Forbes Fabergé collection, comprising nine Imperial Eggs and over 180 other Fabergé objects, was sold privately by the Forbes family to Russian industrialist Viktor Vekselberg for a reported sum of approximately USD 100 million, in advance of a planned Sotheby's auction. The Lilies of the Valley Egg has been on display at the Fabergé Museum in the Shuvalov Palace, St Petersburg, since the museum's opening in 2013.

Significance within the Imperial series

Among the surviving Imperial Eggs (forty-three of fifty are known to exist or to have been documented in modern times), the Lilies of the Valley Egg is consistently ranked among the top tier for design quality, technical execution, and stylistic interest. It is one of seven Imperial Eggs in the Vekselberg Collection, the largest single holding of the series in private hands, and a centrepiece of the Fabergé Museum's permanent display.