The Pelican Egg (1898)
The Pelican Egg (1898)
An Imperial Easter egg by Fabergé, now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
The Pelican Egg is one of the Imperial Easter eggs created by the firm of Peter Carl Fabergé for the Russian imperial family, presented in 1898 by Tsar Nicholas II to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, his mother. It is now part of the Lillian Thomas Pratt collection at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, one of ten Imperial eggs held in American museum collections. The egg's design and execution illustrate the technical mastery and the tradition of mechanical or pictorial surprise that defined the Fabergé Imperial series.
Description
The egg is fabricated in red and yellow gold with engraved enamel decoration. Its outer surface is decorated in the Empire style, with motifs that include the pelican of Christian symbolism — a bird that, in mediaeval iconography, was held to wound its own breast to feed its young, a metaphor for charitable self-sacrifice that Maria Feodorovna had adopted in her work as patron of the Russian charitable institutions for the education of noble women.
The egg opens to reveal a fitted miniature gold easel that supports a folding screen of eight oval miniature portraits, each painted in watercolour on ivory. The miniatures depict the educational institutions over which the Dowager Empress presided as patron — the Smolny Institute, the Catherine Institute, and others — and constitute the egg's surprise, the hidden interior element that was the signature feature of every Imperial egg.
Provenance and history
The Pelican Egg remained in the Russian imperial collections until the Bolshevik Revolution, after which it was confiscated and moved to the Kremlin Armoury. In the 1920s and 1930s the Soviet government sold a number of Fabergé objects, including several Imperial eggs, to Western collectors and dealers as a source of foreign currency. The Pelican Egg was sold in this period and eventually entered the collection of Lillian Thomas Pratt, an American collector whose Fabergé holdings were among the most important assembled in the United States in the twentieth century.
On Pratt's death in 1947, her Fabergé collection was bequeathed to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where the Pelican Egg has been on permanent display since. The museum's Pratt collection includes several Imperial eggs and a substantial body of related Fabergé work, making Richmond one of the principal Fabergé destinations in the United States.
Position in the Imperial series
Carl Fabergé and his workshops produced approximately fifty Imperial Easter eggs between 1885 and 1916, presented annually by Tsar Alexander III and later Tsar Nicholas II to their respective Empresses. The eggs are the apex achievement of the Fabergé firm and among the most celebrated objets d'art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of the surviving eggs, ten are held in American museum collections (including the Pelican Egg at the Virginia Museum), with the largest single concentration in the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow and significant holdings in private collections, the Royal Collection in the United Kingdom, and museums in Switzerland and elsewhere.
The Pelican Egg's place within the series is as one of the more iconographically focused eggs, with its design tied closely to the Dowager Empress's specific charitable role rather than to the more general Imperial dynastic themes of other years. The egg is documented in the standard Fabergé monographs (von Habsburg, Snowman, and others) and in the Virginia Museum's catalogue of the Pratt collection.
The 1898 Easter season was the fourth year in which Tsar Nicholas II had presented Imperial eggs since his accession in 1894 (he ordered two eggs each Easter — one for his mother, the Dowager Empress, and one for his wife, the reigning Empress Alexandra Feodorovna). The Pelican Egg was Nicholas's gift to his mother that year; the Lilies of the Valley Egg, presented to Alexandra in the same Easter season, is the better-known of the 1898 pair and is held in the Forbes collection (now in the Russian National Museum in Moscow). The pairing of these two 1898 eggs illustrates the typical contrast between the more ornate and personally focused gifts to the reigning Empress and the more iconographically ceremonial gifts to the Dowager.
The pelican as symbol
The pelican image at the heart of the egg's iconography draws on a long Christian symbolic tradition. Mediaeval bestiaries described the pelican as a bird that, in times of famine, would pierce its own breast to feed its young with its blood — a self-sacrificial image that was readily allegorised as a figure for Christ's sacrifice. The motif passed into religious art and heraldry across mediaeval and early-modern Europe, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had become a stock symbol of charitable self-sacrifice and maternal care.
For the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, the pelican image was both general religious symbolism and specific personal identification. As patron of the Imperial Educational Society for Noble Maidens — a network of educational institutions for young women of noble families — she had adopted the pelican as her personal emblem of charitable patronage. The egg's pelican imagery is therefore a direct reference to her institutional role and to the educational establishments depicted in the egg's interior surprise.
Workshop and execution
The Pelican Egg was executed in the Fabergé workshops in St Petersburg under the direction of one of Carl Fabergé's senior workmasters. Imperial eggs were produced by a small group of master craftsmen — Mikhail Perkhin, Henrik Wigström, August Holmström, and others — each working with a team of specialised journeymen and apprentices. The Pelican Egg's specific workmaster has been attributed in the Fabergé scholarly literature, with Mikhail Perkhin generally credited based on style and the dating of his workshop's documented production.
The level of execution required for an Imperial egg involved multiple craft specialties: goldsmithing, enamelling, lapidary work, miniature painting, mechanical engineering for the surprise mechanisms, and engraving. Production typically took most of a year, beginning in the late spring after the previous Easter and concluding in time for delivery in the following Easter season. The Imperial commission carried both a generous budget and an obligation of secrecy: the design of each year's egg was kept confidential until presentation, with even the Tsar himself often unaware of the specific contents until Easter morning.
Materials and technique
The Pelican Egg's body is fabricated in red and yellow gold of high karat purity, with engraved decoration cut by skilled hand engravers in the workshops. The use of two gold colours allows the surface decoration to be picked out in contrast against a base ground, a technique consistent with broader Fabergé practice for engraved-and-coloured-gold work. The pelican imagery is integrated into the decorative scheme rather than appearing as an applied or detached element, demonstrating the workshop's preference for unified composition over assembled ornament.
The interior easel and miniature portraits represent a separate set of craft challenges. The folding screen mechanism uses precision-engineered hinges sized to the small scale of the egg's interior cavity, and the screen unfolds smoothly when the egg is opened. The miniature portraits themselves are watercolour-on-ivory work of the standard adopted by the Fabergé workshops for portrait miniatures — a tradition with roots in the eighteenth-century European miniature-painting trade and one in which Russian and Imperial-Russian miniaturists had long specialised.
The Pratt collection
Lillian Thomas Pratt (1876-1947) was an American collector who assembled what became one of the most significant private holdings of Fabergé in the United States. She acquired Fabergé objects principally during the 1930s and 1940s through dealers in New York, London, and Paris, taking advantage of the Soviet sales of Imperial property and the dispersal of émigré Russian aristocratic collections. Her holdings included five Imperial eggs alongside dozens of other Fabergé objects, and her decision to bequeath the entire collection to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond established the museum as one of the principal American destinations for Fabergé scholarship and exhibition.
The Pratt bequest has been displayed in dedicated galleries at the Virginia Museum since the late 1940s, with periodic loans to special exhibitions at other institutions. The museum publishes catalogue documentation of the collection and supports Fabergé scholarship through its curatorial staff.
In the trade and collectors' market
The Imperial Easter eggs are not in commerce; the surviving examples are either in museum collections or in long-term private collections that rarely come to market. When an Imperial egg has appeared at auction in recent decades, prices have been at the highest level recorded for any decorative objet, with the 2007 sale of the Rothschild Fabergé egg at Christie's London at over £8.9 million representing one of the benchmarks of the genre. The Pelican Egg, as a museum holding, is not subject to commercial valuation.
For the working jeweller and the gem trade more broadly, the Pelican Egg and its sibling Imperial eggs represent a historical reference point for what late-nineteenth-century luxury goldsmithing could achieve when supported by an unlimited budget and the prestige of an Imperial commission. The standard of enamelling, miniature painting, and mechanical engineering set by the Fabergé workshops has rarely been matched in subsequent decades and serves as a benchmark for evaluating contemporary high-end work.