The Lily of the Valley Egg of 1898 is one of fifty Imperial Easter Eggs commissioned by the Russian Imperial Family from the House of Fabergé between 1885 and 1916. The egg was the third presented by Tsar Nicholas II to his widowed mother Maria Feodorovna following his accession to the throne in 1894, and it is the only Imperial Egg executed in a fully Art Nouveau idiom. It is currently held at the Fabergé Museum in the Shuvalov Palace, St Petersburg, as part of the Viktor Vekselberg Collection.

Construction and materials

The body of the egg is fabricated in gold and finished overall in translucent rose-pink guilloché enamel laid over an engine-turned wave pattern, producing the silken iridescence characteristic of fine Fabergé enamelling. The base of the egg sits on four cabriole gold supports formed as lily-of-the-valley stems, with green-enamelled leaves curling upward around the body. Climbing the surface of the egg are individual lily-of-the-valley flowers fabricated from oriental pearls set in gold cups, with rose-cut diamond accents at each flower's throat and a single rose-cut diamond at each tip. The flowers are mounted on flexible gold stems using the tremblant setting technique, by which the flowers quiver gently when the piece is handled.

The principal mechanical feature, in keeping with Fabergé's Imperial Egg tradition, is the surprise. Activation of a small diamond-set button at the apex of the egg releases a fan-shaped support that rises from the upper body, carrying three miniature portraits set in rose-cut diamond frames: Tsar Nicholas II at centre, with the Grand Duchess Olga and the Grand Duchess Tatiana flanking him to either side. The miniatures are watercolour on ivory by the court miniaturist Johannes Zehngraf, signed by his hand. Each portrait is surmounted by the Imperial cipher rendered in pavé-set rose-cut diamonds.

Workmasters and authorship

The egg bears the maker's mark of Mikhail Perkhin, the head workmaster at Fabergé's St Petersburg workshop until his death in 1903 and the executor of the substantial majority of Imperial Eggs produced before that date. The design is generally attributed to Franz Birbaum, Fabergé's chief designer from the late 1890s, though contemporary archival records do not name him explicitly for this commission. The miniatures are signed by Zehngraf, who produced miniature portraits for several other Imperial Eggs in this period.

Date confusion and naming

Two superficially similar names appear in the Fabergé literature: this Lily of the Valley Egg of 1898, and the Lily of the Valley Basket of 1896, a non-Imperial Fabergé piece in the form of a flower basket. Auction catalogue entries occasionally conflate the two. The 1898 piece is invariably referred to in scholarly literature as the Lilies of the Valley Egg or Lily of the Valley Egg, with the date or the Imperial designation appended for disambiguation.

Provenance

Following its presentation in April 1898, the egg remained in Maria Feodorovna's possession through her residence at the Anichkov Palace and her later years at Hvidøre in Denmark following her departure from Russia in 1919. After her death in 1928 it entered the international antiquities market through the Soviet government's sale of Imperial property in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Armand Hammer's Hammer Galleries in New York acquired it in 1933, and it subsequently passed through several private hands, including those of Matilda Geddings Gray of New Orleans, before being acquired by the Forbes family for the Forbes Magazine Collection.

The Forbes family had assembled the largest private collection of Imperial Eggs outside the Russian state collections, with nine of the original fifty. In February 2004, ahead of a planned Sotheby's auction, the entire Forbes Fabergé collection, including the Lily of the Valley Egg, was sold privately to Russian industrialist Viktor Vekselberg for a reported total consideration of approximately USD 100 million. Vekselberg subsequently established the Fabergé Museum at the Shuvalov Palace in St Petersburg, which opened to the public in November 2013, and the egg has been on permanent display there since.

Stylistic and historical importance

The 1898 Lily of the Valley Egg is consistently cited as one of the most artistically significant of the Imperial series. Its Art Nouveau styling places it at the cutting edge of European decorative arts at the moment of its creation, and it represents an unusual departure from the predominant historicist and neoclassical idioms of the Imperial Eggs. The personal symbolism of the lily-of-the-valley, Maria Feodorovna's known favourite flower, gives the egg a tenderness atypical of the more formally ceremonial Imperial commissions, and the triple portrait reflects Nicholas's evident concern to honour his mother's continuing place in the dynasty as well as his own family.

For collectors and scholars, the egg is one of the most readily identifiable Imperial pieces, both in style and in the photographic record. It appears in essentially every published survey of Fabergé and remains a cornerstone display object at the Fabergé Museum.