The Peter the Great Egg, 1903
The Peter the Great Egg, 1903
Faberge's bicentenary tribute to St Petersburg, now at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
The Peter the Great Egg is the 1903 Imperial Easter Egg presented by Tsar Nicholas II to his consort Alexandra Feodorovna, made by the workshops of Carl Faberge under workmaster Mikhail Perkhin. The egg commemorates the bicentenary of the founding of St Petersburg by Peter the Great in 1703, and its surprise — a miniature gold model of the Bronze Horseman, Etienne-Maurice Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter — rises mechanically from the interior when the lid is opened. The egg has been part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts collection since 1947, acquired through the bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Form and construction
The egg is fashioned in red, green, and yellow gold with platinum, and is set with rose-cut diamonds and rubies. The exterior is divided by a rococo cartouche framework that supports four miniature watercolour-on-ivory paintings: views of the cabin of Peter the Great preserved at St Petersburg, the Winter Palace as it stood in 1903, and the city as Peter found it and as it had become two centuries later. Each panel is signed by the miniaturist Vassily Zuiev, who painted nearly all of the surviving Imperial Egg miniatures from the late 1890s through 1916. The framework is set with rose-cut diamonds and surmounted by an imperial double-headed eagle in gold and rose-cut diamonds.
The mechanical surprise is housed in the body of the egg. When the egg is opened, a miniature reproduction in gold of the Bronze Horseman — the Falconet statue erected by Catherine the Great in 1782 — rises on its sapphire plinth. The plinth is engraved with the Cyrillic inscription characteristic of the original monument, and the figure is articulated to a level of detail that allows identification of the rearing horse, Peter's outstretched arm, and the serpent beneath the horse's hooves.
Iconographic programme
The egg is the most explicitly historical of the Imperial Eggs, and its programme is a meditation on the dynastic continuity Nicholas II saw between himself and the city's founder. The miniature paintings juxtapose the rough origins of St Petersburg — Peter's cabin, the Neva delta as he found it — with the imperial city of 1903, projecting a narrative of two centuries of Romanov building. The Bronze Horseman, the symbol of Peter's authority, was a charged emblem in 1903; Aleksandr Pushkin's poem of the same name, written in 1833, had given the statue a literary afterlife as a representation of imperial power and individual fate. The choice of subject would have been read by an educated court audience as both a celebration and a quiet political statement.
Workshop attribution
The egg was made under the direction of Mikhail Perkhin, the head workmaster of the Faberge jewellery workshop until his death in 1903. The Peter the Great Egg is among the last works completed under Perkhin's leadership; he was succeeded that year by Henrik Wigstrom, who oversaw the production of subsequent Imperial Eggs through to 1917. The miniatures are signed by Vassily Zuiev. The egg bears the marks of the Faberge house and the assay marks of St Petersburg.
Provenance
The egg was kept by Alexandra Feodorovna at the Anichkov Palace and later at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Following the Revolution, it was transferred to the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow with most of the other Imperial Eggs. In 1930 the Soviet government, in need of foreign currency, began the systematic sale of Imperial holdings; the Peter the Great Egg passed through the Antikvariat agency to the New York dealer Armand Hammer, and from there into the collection of Lillian Thomas Pratt, the wife of a General Motors executive who assembled the largest American collection of Faberge in the 1930s and 1940s. Pratt bequeathed her collection — including five Imperial Eggs — to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on her death in 1947.
Display and study
The Peter the Great Egg is on permanent display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, in galleries dedicated to the Pratt collection. The museum's catalogue and conservation reports are the principal scholarly references for the object; the Faberge Museum in St Petersburg and the Royal Collection Trust hold related comparative material. The egg is shown with the Bronze Horseman surprise raised to display the mechanical action.
In the trade
The Peter the Great Egg is not a market object; it is a museum holding and is unlikely ever to return to private hands. Its significance for collectors and dealers is instead as a reference point for attribution and condition assessment of related Faberge work, particularly the surviving Imperial Eggs of the Perkhin period. Comparison with the Pratt-Virginia material is a routine step in the authentication of period Faberge.