Order of St George Egg, 1916 — Faberge in the Last Year of Empire
Order of St George Egg, 1916 — Faberge in the Last Year of Empire
Tsar Nicholas II's Easter gift to his mother during the First World War, austere by Faberge standards
The Order of St George Egg is the Imperial Easter egg presented by Tsar Nicholas II to his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, at Easter 1916. It is one of the last Faberge Imperial eggs delivered before the Russian Revolution, and one of only two Imperial eggs that left Russia with their owner rather than passing through the Bolshevik state's seizures of 1918 to 1922. The piece is characteristic of Faberge's wartime austerity series, executed in white guilloche enamel and gold rather than the precious-stone-laden virtuosity of earlier years.
Description
The egg is a vertically oriented ovoid shell of two-tone gold, covered in translucent opalescent white enamel laid over a guilloche ground of radiating sunburst engine-turning. Two miniature representations of the Cross of the Order of St George are applied to the surface in red, white, and gold enamel; the cross hangs on its characteristic black-and-orange ribbon. A miniature equestrian figure of St George slaying the dragon, executed in chased gold and polychrome enamel, is set within the body of the egg. The whole rests on a small turned base.
The piece is markedly smaller and less lavishly jewelled than pre-war Imperial eggs such as the Coronation Egg of 1897 or the Lilies of the Valley Egg of 1898. The shift in scale and ornament is deliberate, reflecting the constraints of wartime production and the family's public modesty during the conflict.
Historical context
The Imperial Faberge eggs were produced annually between 1885 and 1917 for the Romanov court, originating with Tsar Alexander III's gift to his wife Maria Feodorovna and continuing under Nicholas II, who commissioned two eggs each year — one for his mother, one for his wife Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. By 1916 the firm of Carl Faberge was operating under the strictures of the war economy, and the eggs of this period are notably restrained.
The Order of St George itself, founded by Catherine the Great in 1769, is Imperial Russia's highest military decoration for valour, and Nicholas II had received the Fourth Class of the Order in 1915 for visiting the front lines. The egg's iconography therefore links the gift to the Tsar's wartime role as commander-in-chief and to the family's identification with the army during the conflict.
Provenance
The Order of St George Egg has the simplest survival history of any Imperial egg. When Maria Feodorovna fled Russia in 1919 aboard the British battleship HMS Marlborough, sent by her nephew King George V to evacuate her from Crimea, she carried the egg with her into exile. She lived out her remaining years in Denmark, where she died in 1928. The egg passed by inheritance to her daughter Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, and from Xenia through subsequent sales into private hands.
In 2004, the Order of St George Egg was acquired with eight other Imperial eggs by Russian industrialist Viktor Vekselberg, who returned the collection to Russia. The piece is held by the Faberge Museum in St Petersburg, established by Vekselberg's Link of Times Foundation, and is on public display alongside the largest assembly of Imperial eggs anywhere.
In the trade
For the gem and jewellery trade, the wartime Faberge eggs are studied less for their stones — there are very few — than for what they show about a great workshop adapting to political and material constraint. The Order of St George Egg's importance lies in its provenance: it is the only Imperial egg whose chain of custody runs unbroken from the original recipient to the present, never having passed through the Soviet state's confiscation and dispersal of court treasure.
Comparable eggs of the wartime years — the Steel Military Egg of 1916 (Kremlin Armoury), the Cross of St George Egg, the Red Cross with Imperial Portraits Egg of 1915 — are studied together as evidence of Faberge's late-Imperial style. None are commercially available; all are in museum or foundation collections.