Peacock Egg 1908 — The Imperial Fabergé with the Folding Mother-of-Pearl Surprise
Peacock Egg 1908 — The Imperial Fabergé with the Folding Mother-of-Pearl Surprise
Tsar Nicholas II's Easter gift to Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, now in the Sandoz Foundation collection in Lausanne
The Peacock Egg of 1908 is one of the fifty Imperial Fabergé eggs presented by the last two Tsars of Russia to their wives at Easter, and one of the small group of these eggs that remained in private hands throughout the twentieth century rather than passing through the Soviet sale catalogues of the 1920s and 1930s. It was presented by Tsar Nicholas II to Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna at Easter 1908 and is now held by the Edouard and Maurice Sandoz Foundation in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The egg
The Peacock Egg is executed in rock crystal carved into a transparent egg form, which serves as the housing for the surprise contained within. The crystal shell is set with two-colour gold mounts and rose-cut diamonds, with a portrait diamond at the apex through which the surprise is visible. The egg's design departs from the more characteristic guilloché-and-enamel format of many other Imperial eggs by using transparent crystal as a window onto the mechanism inside — a recurring Fabergé strategy, employed also in the 1900 Cuckoo Egg and the 1910 Colonnade Egg.
The surprise inside is a fully articulated automaton peacock perched on the branches of an enamelled gold tree. When activated, the bird raises its tail, fans the rose-cut diamond and enamel feathers, and walks across its perch. The mechanism was executed by the workmaster Dorofeiev under Fabergé's supervision and is one of the most technically accomplished automata in the Imperial Fabergé corpus. The peacock's tail feathers are individually articulated and inset with rose-cut diamonds and enamel.
Workmaster and execution
The Peacock Egg was executed in Fabergé's St Petersburg workshop. Henrik Wigström served as Fabergé's senior workmaster from 1903 onward, succeeding Mikhail Perchin, and the bulk of the Imperial eggs from 1903 to 1917 carry his maker's mark or were produced under his supervision. The Peacock Egg's craftsmanship — particularly the sustained mechanical reliability of the automaton more than a century later — is consistent with Wigström's documented standard.
Provenance
The Peacock Egg was confiscated, like all Imperial Fabergé eggs, after the 1917 Russian Revolution and held by the Soviet government through the 1920s. Unlike many of the eggs subsequently sold to Armand Hammer, Lord Forbes, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and other Western collectors, the Peacock Egg passed comparatively early into private Western hands and has not changed ownership in the decades since its acquisition by Maurice Sandoz, the Swiss collector and pharmaceutical heir whose Fabergé collection forms the core of the Sandoz Foundation.
The Sandoz Foundation in Lausanne now holds the egg as part of its public-facing collection of Fabergé and decorative-arts material. The egg has been exhibited internationally on selected occasions, including loans to major Fabergé exhibitions in St Petersburg, London, and New York.
Position in the Fabergé corpus
The fifty Imperial eggs are the most-discussed corpus in Russian decorative art. The Peacock Egg is consistently ranked among the most technically accomplished — the automaton mechanism alone places it in a small subset of the Imperial eggs that combine jewelled exterior with functioning mechanical surprise. Comparable mechanically inclined eggs include the 1900 Cuckoo, the 1908 Alexander Palace, and the 1903 Royal Danish, though the Peacock's combination of crystal shell and complex automaton is distinctive.
For the trade, the Peacock Egg is a reference point rather than a market piece — it is not for sale, has no realistic prospect of becoming so, and serves principally as a benchmark in discussions of Fabergé craftsmanship and condition. Auction-market activity for Imperial eggs is rare; the most recent Imperial-egg sale at public auction was the 2014 surfacing of the Third Imperial Egg of 1887, which sold privately after a brief public attribution.