Rose Trellis Egg (1907) — Fabergé's Pink Enamel for the Tsarevich's First Year
Rose Trellis Egg (1907) — Fabergé's Pink Enamel for the Tsarevich's First Year
An Imperial Easter egg presented by Tsar Nicholas II to Empress Alexandra Feodorovna in 1907, now in the Walters Art Museum
The Rose Trellis Egg is one of the fifty-odd Imperial Easter eggs produced by the workshop of Peter Carl Fabergé in St Petersburg between 1885 and 1917 for the Russian Imperial family. Presented in 1907 by Tsar Nicholas II to his wife, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, the egg combines translucent pink guilloché enamel, an overlaid trellis of rose-cut diamonds and green-enamelled foliage, and an internal surprise of a diamond-set easel bearing a miniature portrait of the heir-apparent, the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich. The piece is held today in the collection of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where it has remained on continuous display since its acquisition by the museum's founder, Henry Walters, in 1930.
Description
The egg measures approximately 7.7 centimetres in height. The body is a single continuous shell of yellow gold, finished with a translucent rose-pink enamel laid over a guilloché ground engine-turned in a fine sunburst pattern that radiates from each pole of the egg. Light entering the enamel reflects from the engine-turned ground beneath, producing the characteristic optical activity of fine guilloché work — a shimmering depth that no opaque enamel can replicate.
Over this pink ground is laid a trellis of green-enamelled gold leaves and stems, set with rose-cut diamonds at the intersections of the trellis. The overall composition reads as a climbing rose plant — leaves and stems forming the lattice, diamonds substituting for blossoms — wrapped continuously around the surface of the egg. The base and crown of the egg carry larger diamond clusters; a portrait diamond sits at each pole.
The surprise originally enclosed within the egg is now lost. Surviving documentation indicates that it consisted of a diamond chain bearing a diamond-set medallion with a portrait miniature of the Tsarevich Alexei, then aged three. The portrait and chain disappeared at some point during the upheaval following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent dispersal of the Imperial Fabergé collection.
Workmanship
The Rose Trellis Egg is signed by Henrik Wigström, the workmaster who succeeded Mikhail Perchin as head of the principal Fabergé workshop in 1903. Wigström directed the production of most of the Imperial eggs from 1903 until 1917 and is associated with many of the workshop's most refined enamel and engine-turned pieces. The 1907 egg exemplifies the workshop's mature mastery of the combination of guilloché, translucent enamel, and gem-set ornament that defined the Fabergé style.
The pink enamel is technically demanding. Translucent enamel over a guilloché ground requires multiple firings to build a film thick enough to provide depth without obscuring the engine-turned pattern beneath, and the firing process must hold the workpiece within a narrow temperature range to avoid disrupting either the enamel or the underlying gold. The colour itself — a soft, slightly cool pink — was the workshop's signature tone for several pieces of the period and is sometimes described in the trade literature as Fabergé pink.
History and provenance
The egg was commissioned by Nicholas II as the 1907 Easter gift to Alexandra. Fabergé received an annual commission for two Imperial eggs — one for the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna and one for the reigning Empress — and delivered the Rose Trellis Egg as the second of two for that year. It remained in the personal possession of Alexandra until the Revolution, after which the Imperial Fabergé collection was inventoried by Soviet authorities and eventually dispersed.
Henry Walters acquired the Rose Trellis Egg in 1930, during the Soviet sales of Imperial-era objects through international dealers including Armand Hammer's Hammer Galleries. The egg passed into the Walters Art Gallery — now the Walters Art Museum — at the founder's death and has been continuously on display in Baltimore since.
Place in the Imperial series
Forty-three of the original fifty Imperial eggs are known to survive, with the locations of seven still unaccounted for. The Rose Trellis Egg is one of ten Imperial eggs held in American institutional collections, alongside pieces in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Hillwood Estate Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Royal Collection in the United Kingdom. The Walters' holdings are notable for the inclusion of two Imperial eggs and a substantial broader Fabergé collection assembled by Henry Walters across the 1920s and 1930s.