The Resurrection Egg — Fabergé's Rock Crystal Imperial Easter Egg
The Resurrection Egg — Fabergé's Rock Crystal Imperial Easter Egg
An early Imperial commission with a religious surprise inside, attributed to the workshop of Mikhail Perkhin
The Resurrection Egg is one of the earlier Imperial Easter eggs produced by the firm of Carl Fabergé for the Russian Imperial Family. It is dated by most authorities to either 1885 (the first year of Imperial commissions) or, in the alternative chronology proposed by some scholars, to a slightly later year in the 1880s; the dating is uncertain because original workshop records do not survive and the early Imperial provenance is reconstructed from a combination of court accounts, Fabergé invoices, and the surviving physical evidence. The egg comprises a rock crystal shell with gold and enamel mounts, opening to reveal a sculptural surprise depicting the Resurrection of Christ, and is unmistakably one of the more religiously charged of the Imperial commissions.
Description
The egg is an oval rock crystal vessel mounted in chased gold settings at top and bottom, decorated with bands of guilloché enamel in white and ivory tones with applied seed-pearl borders. The gold mounts include floral and architectural motifs in the chased reliefs, and the joints between the rock crystal halves are precisely fitted to allow the egg to open as a hinged container. The interior surprise consists of a miniature gold and enamel sculptural group depicting Christ rising from the tomb, with attendant angel figures, modelled in the round and finished with painted enamels in the conventional iconographic colours.
The principal craftsman to whom the egg is most often attributed is Mikhail Evlampievich Perkhin (1860–1903), the senior workmaster of the Fabergé St Petersburg workshop and the maker of many of the earlier Imperial Easter eggs. Perkhin's mark — initials in Cyrillic — is reported to be present on the egg, alongside the standard Fabergé and St Petersburg assay marks of the period.
Imperial commission and presentation
The Imperial Easter egg tradition was inaugurated in 1885 when Tsar Alexander III commissioned a jewelled egg from Fabergé as an Easter gift for his consort, the Empress Maria Feodorovna (born Princess Dagmar of Denmark). The first egg, the Hen Egg of 1885, was so well received that Alexander III commissioned an annual Easter egg from the firm thereafter, a tradition continued by his son Nicholas II following his accession in 1894. By the close of the dynasty in 1917, fifty Imperial Easter eggs had been delivered, of which approximately forty-four are known to survive.
The Resurrection Egg is one of the eggs from the Alexander III period, presented to Maria Feodorovna at one of the Easters of the late 1880s. The religious subject — the Resurrection of Christ — was directly suited to the Easter occasion and reflected the deep Orthodox piety of the Imperial family.
Iconography and theological context
The Resurrection theme is the central event of the Orthodox liturgical calendar, and the egg-shaped vessel is itself a traditional Orthodox Easter symbol carrying the meaning of the tomb from which Christ emerged. The combination is therefore deeply resonant in the Russian Orthodox tradition: the rock crystal shell evokes both the egg of the season and the rolled-back stone of the Resurrection narrative, and the sculptural surprise within provides a literal depiction of the moment of rising. The iconography draws on the conventional Russian Orthodox treatment of the Anastasis, with the figures of the Risen Christ and attendant angels rendered in the formal posture of liturgical art rather than in naturalistic pose.
Provenance and twentieth-century history
Following the 1917 Revolution, the Bolshevik government inventoried and confiscated the contents of the Imperial palaces, including the Easter eggs that remained in the Imperial collection. A number of eggs, including some from the Alexander III period, passed through the Soviet government's sales of art and treasure during the late 1920s and 1930s, brokered through Armand Hammer and other dealers, and were dispersed into Western private collections. The Resurrection Egg is documented to have left the Soviet Union during this period and to have entered Western private ownership.
The egg's twentieth-century ownership history includes passage through several major collections of Fabergé and Imperial Russian decorative art. As of the most recent published accounts, the Resurrection Egg is in private collection, although exact current ownership is not always disclosed and is sometimes obscured behind nominee structures common in the high-end art market. The egg has been exhibited periodically in major Fabergé exhibitions, including the touring exhibitions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Position in the corpus
Within the corpus of fifty Imperial Easter eggs, the Resurrection Egg occupies an early position both chronologically and stylistically. It demonstrates the developing technical and iconographic vocabulary that would reach its full flowering in the elaborate eggs of the Nicholas II period — the Coronation Egg of 1897, the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg of 1900, the Lilies of the Valley Egg of 1898 — but it already shows the central characteristics of the Imperial format: a precisely fitted shell of precious or semiprecious material, an interior surprise that converts the egg into a small theatrical event when opened, and a level of finish that elevates it to the status of court-quality decorative art.
The egg's relatively modest scale and restrained decorative palette mark it as part of the earlier production, before the firm's later development of more elaborate constructions and more ostentatious applied jewellery work. For collectors and scholars, the early Alexander III eggs are valued precisely for this combination of restraint and confidence — the firm establishing the format that it would refine over the subsequent three decades.
In the trade and market
The Imperial Easter eggs are among the most valuable Fabergé objects, and the small market in their occasional public sales is closely watched by Fabergé scholars and collectors. The Forbes Collection eggs, sold to the Russian collector Viktor Vekselberg in 2004 for approximately $90 million for nine eggs (an average above $10 million per egg), established a benchmark for the category, although individual eggs have traded both above and below that average depending on importance, condition, and historical significance. The Resurrection Egg's market position would, on any reasonable estimate, place it in the same category, although the egg has not been the subject of a recent public sale.