The Romanov Tercentenary Egg, 1913
The Romanov Tercentenary Egg, 1913
The Imperial Fabergé egg commemorating three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty
The Romanov Tercentenary Egg is one of the fifty Imperial Easter eggs delivered by the firm of Carl Fabergé to the Russian imperial family between 1885 and 1916. Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II as the 1913 Easter gift to his wife, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, the egg commemorates the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty's accession in 1613. It is one of the most explicitly historical of the Imperial eggs, both in iconography and in its commemorative role within the carefully staged 1913 jubilee celebrations. The egg has resided since the 1920s in the Kremlin Armoury Museum (Oruzheinaya Palata) in Moscow, where it remains one of the most-visited objects of the imperial collection.
Description
The egg is enamelled in opaque white over a guilloché silver ground and decorated with applied gold double-headed imperial eagles, gold trefoils, and Romanov crowns. Eighteen circular miniature portraits, painted on ivory by the Imperial miniaturist Vasily Zuiev, depict the eighteen Romanov rulers from Tsar Mikhail (acceded 1613) to Nicholas II himself. Each portrait is framed in a setting of seed pearls and brilliant-cut diamonds. The egg stands on a base in the form of the Russian imperial double-headed eagle, holding the orb and sceptre, mounted on a shield-shaped purpurine plinth.
The surprise of the egg is contained within: a steel terrestrial globe, gilded for the territories of the Russian Empire, showing two hemispheres. One hemisphere displays the empire's territory in 1613, the year of the dynasty's accession; the other shows the territory at the time of the egg's making in 1913, illustrating the geographic expansion of the empire over three centuries.
Workmasters and attribution
The egg was made in the workshop of Henrik Wigström, the principal Fabergé workmaster after Mikhail Perkhin's death in 1903. The portraits are signed by Vasily Zuiev, who painted miniatures for several other Imperial eggs in the same period. The egg is marked with Fabergé and Wigström marks and Saint Petersburg city marks for the period.
The 1913 Tercentenary celebrations
The Romanov Tercentenary, marked across the Russian Empire in 1913, was the regime's most ambitious self-commemoration. The celebrations included religious services at the Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma (where the boy-tsar Mikhail had been called to the throne in 1613), processions, the issuance of commemorative coins and medals, and significant artistic and architectural commissions. The Tercentenary Egg sits within this broader programme, expressing the dynasty's continuity and the empire's territorial achievement in a single object of personal Easter exchange between the Tsar and Tsarina. The historical irony is unmistakable: within five years of the egg's presentation, Nicholas II and his family were dead, and the dynasty had ended.
Survival and the Kremlin Armoury
After the 1917 Revolution, the Imperial Easter eggs were confiscated by the Bolshevik government and concentrated in the Kremlin Armoury. Several were sold abroad in the 1920s and 1930s during the Soviet government's programme of treasure liquidation; the Tercentenary Egg, however, was retained, possibly because of its explicitly historical and dynastic content. Today ten of the fifty Imperial eggs are held by the Kremlin Armoury, and the Tercentenary Egg is one of the central pieces of the museum's Fabergé display.
Conservation and display
The egg is displayed in a controlled-environment vitrine within the Armoury's permanent exhibition. Conservation has addressed minor losses to the enamel and routine cleaning of metal surfaces. The miniature portraits, fragile by their nature, are monitored for stability. The egg has occasionally travelled for special exhibitions, including loans to the Hermitage and to international Fabergé exhibitions in the 1990s and 2000s.
Place in the Imperial corpus
Among the fifty Imperial eggs, the Tercentenary Egg ranks high in historical interest if not in technical innovation. The Coronation Egg of 1897, the Lilies of the Valley Egg of 1898, and the Memory of Azov Egg of 1891 are arguably more sophisticated as miniature gold-and-enamel art objects, but the Tercentenary Egg is unique in the corpus as a deliberately and elaborately historical object, set within the political programme of the dynasty's last full peace-time year. For students of Fabergé and of late Imperial Russia, the egg is a primary document of the regime's self-image at a critical moment.
In the trade
Imperial Fabergé eggs do not circulate in the trade; the entire surviving corpus is held in institutional or major private collections, principally the Kremlin Armoury, the Forbes Collection (sold in 2004 to Viktor Vekselberg, who established the Fabergé Museum in Saint Petersburg), the Hillwood Estate, the Royal Collection of the United Kingdom, and a small number of other museums. Pieces of Fabergé generally — non-Imperial eggs, jewellery, hardstone carvings, and presentation objects — do circulate, often through specialist sales at the major auction houses, with provenance research central to value. The Tercentenary Egg itself is a national treasure of the Russian Federation and is not foreseeably available for any private acquisition.