Rothschild Egg — Fabergé's Lost-and-Found Banking-Family Easter Egg
Rothschild Egg — Fabergé's Lost-and-Found Banking-Family Easter Egg
A non-Imperial Fabergé egg of 1902, rediscovered in 2007 and sold at Christie's for a then-record price
The Rothschild Egg is a Fabergé Easter egg created in 1902 for the Rothschild banking family of Paris, distinguished from the contemporaneous Imperial series both by its non-Imperial commission and by an unusually animated mechanical surprise — a gem-set automaton cockerel that emerges from the top of the egg, flaps its wings, opens its beak, and crows on the hour. The piece disappeared from public view for most of the twentieth century and re-emerged at Christie's London in 2007, where it sold for £8.98 million, then a world record for any Fabergé object and for any Russian work of art at auction.
Description
The egg stands approximately twenty-seven centimetres tall on a circular base and is constructed in yellow gold, with a translucent rose-pink enamel finish over a guilloché ground. The body of the egg carries an applied trellis of rose-cut diamonds and oriental pearls and is mounted with diamond-set garlands at the equator. Surface ornament is in the late-Louis-XVI revival style that Fabergé and his contemporaries drew from for non-Imperial commissions intended for an internationally cosmopolitan clientele.
The mechanical surprise is the egg's most distinctive feature. On the hour, the upper portion of the egg opens to reveal a diamond-set cockerel automaton, which rises into view, flaps its enamelled wings, opens its beak, and produces a crowing sound, before retracting into the egg as the upper section closes. The mechanism, driven by a clockwork movement housed in the lower portion of the egg, runs on the hour throughout the day and was designed by Fabergé's principal workmaster Mikhail Perchin in collaboration with the workshop's clockmaker.
Commission and provenance
The egg was commissioned by Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild, a member of the Rothschild banking family and an active patron of the decorative arts. Béatrice gave the egg as an engagement present to Germaine Halphen, who married her brother Édouard de Rothschild in 1905. The egg passed through Halphen-Rothschild family hands across the twentieth century and was little known to scholars during this period; surviving documentation places it in the family collection but does not record public exhibitions of consequence.
In November 2007, the egg was offered at Christie's London by descendants of the original owners, accompanied by full provenance documentation and an export licence. The pre-sale estimate of £6 to £9 million was exceeded by the hammer price; the final price of £8.98 million inclusive of buyer's premium set a world record both for Fabergé and for Russian works of art at auction. The buyer was the Russian collector and businessman Alexander Ivanov, whose Fabergé Museum eventually transferred the egg to the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg as part of a 2014 gift.
Status within the Fabergé corpus
The Rothschild Egg is not an Imperial commission and is therefore not counted among the fifty Imperial Easter eggs delivered to Tsar Alexander III and Tsar Nicholas II between 1885 and 1917. Fabergé did, however, produce a small number of comparable eggs for non-Imperial clients of similar standing — including the Kelch family of Russian industrialists and the Yusupov princely family — and these eggs are sometimes grouped under the heading private commissions or major non-Imperial eggs. The Rothschild Egg, the seven Kelch eggs, and the Duchess of Marlborough Egg are the most significant pieces in this category.
The Rothschild Egg is signed and marked for Mikhail Perchin's workshop, with the year 1902 and the workmaster's mark. Perchin directed the principal Fabergé workshop from approximately 1886 until his death in 1903 and is associated with many of the most ambitious Imperial and private commissions of the firm's late-nineteenth-century output.
Significance
The 2007 sale of the Rothschild Egg materially changed the auction market for Fabergé and for Russian decorative arts more broadly. Pre-2007, the Fabergé market had moved at six- and low-seven-figure dollar levels for major pieces; the £8.98 million Rothschild result, together with subsequent Russian-art records at the major houses, defined a new tier in which exceptional Fabergé objects routinely transact in the high seven and low eight figures. The egg also drew renewed scholarly attention to non-Imperial Fabergé commissions and to the family histories that had carried these pieces through the twentieth century.