Red Cross with Imperial Portraits Egg 1915
Red Cross with Imperial Portraits Egg 1915
The 1915 Imperial Easter egg made for Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna
The Red Cross with Imperial Portraits Egg, sometimes called the Red Cross Egg with Imperial Portraits or simply the 1915 Red Cross Egg with Portraits, is the Imperial Easter egg presented by Tsar Nicholas II to his wife, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, at Easter 1915. The egg was the companion to the Red Cross Triptych Egg presented to the Tsar's mother the same Easter; both pieces commemorate the imperial family's wartime nursing work and form a coordinated pair within the late Imperial Fabergé production. Made under the direction of workmaster Henrik Wigström, the egg's restrained materials and explicitly patriotic theme mark it as a defining piece of the wartime egg series.
Description and construction
The egg is constructed of gold and silver, enamelled in opalescent white over a guilloché engraved ground. Two large red enamel crosses dominate the front and back faces of the egg, with painted Cyrillic inscriptions reading 1914 on one and 1915 on the other, marking the beginning and continuation of the wartime Red Cross effort. A continuous gold band encircles the egg horizontally and bears a Cyrillic inscription, with the words from the Gospel of John 15:13 — Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends — reflecting the religious and sacrificial framing of wartime nursing service.
The egg opens at a horizontal hinge to reveal an interior surprise quite different from its companion piece. Where the Dowager Empress's egg contains a folding triptych on ivory, the Tsarina's egg holds a folding screen of five miniature portraits painted on ivory by the court miniaturist Vassily Zuiev. The portraits depict the Tsarina herself, her four daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and her cousin Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna — all in the white nursing uniforms of the Russian Red Cross — making the personal nature of the gift explicit. The screen unfolds horizontally and shows the family members in matched portrait formats, side by side as nursing colleagues rather than as imperial figures.
The dimensions are similar to those of the companion Triptych Egg: approximately 8.6 centimetres in height. The opalescent white enamel — technically demanding and characteristic of late Fabergé production at its highest level — is laid over an engraved guilloché ground that creates a soft moiré shimmer beneath the surface. The red enamel of the crosses is a deeper, opaque application that sits clearly forward of the white field, and the gold rim mouldings define the structural lines without competing for visual attention.
Historical context
The Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna and her two elder daughters, Olga and Tatiana, qualified as Red Cross nurses early in the war and worked at the imperial hospital established at Tsarskoye Selo. Their nursing service was extensively documented in photographs of the period and represented a significant departure from the protocol-bound role of the Russian Empress in peacetime. Alexandra was personally committed to the work and saw it as both a religious duty and a substantive contribution to the war effort; the family's identification with wartime nursing was central to their public position during 1914 and 1915.
The 1915 Easter eggs explicitly celebrated this identification. The pairing of the Triptych Egg for the Dowager Empress (who led the broader Red Cross organisation) with the Portraits Egg for the Tsarina (who personally nursed) made the imperial family's wartime work the central subject of the year's Easter gift-giving. The deliberate restraint of materials in both eggs reflected the broader tonal shift in the imperial household during the war: ostentation was inappropriate; identification with the soldiers' suffering was the appropriate posture for the Romanov family.
The historical irony of these eggs would emerge over the following years. By the time of the next Easter, in 1916, the political situation in Russia was deteriorating. By Easter 1917 the Tsar had abdicated and the imperial family was effectively imprisoned at Tsarskoye Selo. The 1917 eggs, planned but not delivered, represent the abrupt close of the Imperial egg series. The Red Cross Portraits Egg therefore stands among the last fully realised Imperial pieces and as a snapshot of the imperial family at what was, in retrospect, the final stable moment of their public life.
Workmaster and attribution
Henrik Wigström, chief workmaster of Fabergé from 1903 until the firm's closure, was responsible for the egg's production as for nearly all Imperial eggs of the late period. The opalescent white enamel — the most technically demanding part of the egg's manufacture — represents the late Fabergé workshop's mastery of guilloché enamelling at its most refined. The miniature paintings of the imperial family were the work of Vassily Zuiev, the court miniaturist whose work appears on several Imperial eggs of the wartime period.
Wigström's mark, together with Fabergé's, is present on the egg according to standard practice for Imperial pieces. The egg's construction, including the precision of the hinge mechanism, the cleanness of the enamel application, and the alignment of the painted gold band, demonstrates the workshop's continuing technical excellence even under wartime constraints on materials and labour.
Provenance and current location
The egg was presented to the Tsarina at Easter 1915 and remained in the imperial family's possession until the revolutionary upheavals of 1917. After the abdication and the family's imprisonment, the imperial collection was inventoried by the Provisional Government and subsequently confiscated by the Bolsheviks. The Soviet authorities of the 1920s and 1930s sold significant numbers of imperial treasures to international buyers as a means of generating foreign currency for industrialisation, and many of the Imperial Fabergé eggs entered private collections during this period through dealers including Armand Hammer of New York.
The Red Cross Portraits Egg's provenance during the post-revolutionary decades is less complete than that of some other Imperial pieces. The egg was held in private collections through much of the twentieth century and its specific ownership history during this period remains partially documented. The egg resurfaced publicly at auction in 2004 and was sold to a private collector. Its current location is reported to be in a private collection, with periodic loans for exhibition; it has not been on continuous public display in the manner of the Cleveland Triptych Egg.
The reappearance at auction in 2004 was a significant event in Fabergé scholarship, as the egg's whereabouts had been uncertain for decades. The auction documentation provided new information about the egg's mid-twentieth-century history and contributed to the broader scholarly project of reconstructing the dispersal of Imperial Fabergé pieces after 1917.
Position in the Imperial egg series
The Red Cross Portraits Egg is one of approximately fifty Imperial Easter eggs produced for the Russian imperial family between 1885 and 1917, of which forty-six are documented and forty-three currently known to survive. With its companion Triptych Egg of the same year, it forms one of the most historically resonant pieces of the wartime subgroup within the series — the eggs that document the imperial family's identification with Russian wartime suffering and that mark the close of the Imperial era at Fabergé.
For collectors and scholars, the wartime eggs are increasingly valued precisely because of their understatement and their explicit historical referencing. They depart from the elaborate decorative programme of the pre-war eggs and instead participate in the broader narrative of the First World War and the end of the Romanov dynasty. The Red Cross Portraits Egg, with its named portraits of the imperial daughters in nursing uniforms, brings the personal and political dimensions of this narrative into particularly sharp focus.