Easter Egg

Carl Faberge and his firm's jewelers created the first egg in 1885. It was ordered by Tsar Alexander III as an Easter surprise for his wife Maria Feodorovna. The so-called "Chicken" egg is coated on the outside with a white enamel imitating a shell, and inside, in a "yolk" made of matte gold, is a chicken made of colored gold. Inside the chicken, in turn, is hidden a small ruby crown (cf. the tradition of folding matryoshka dolls) - later lost. The Fabergé Easter egg was supposed to become a free interpretation of an egg made at the beginning of the 18th century, 3 of which are known today. They are located: in the Rosenberg castle (Copenhagen); in the Museum of Art History (Vienna) and in a private collection (previously - in the art gallery "Green Arches", Dresden). In all the aforementioned specimens of eggs, a chicken is hidden, opening which, you can find a crown, and in it - a ring. It is believed that the emperor wanted to please his wife with a surprise that would remind her of a well-known product from the Danish royal treasury. The empress was so fascinated by the gift that Faberge, who turned into a court jeweler, was ordered to make an egg every year; the product had to be unique and contain some kind of surprise, that was the only condition. The next emperor, Nicholas II, kept this tradition, each spring giving, in turn, two eggs - one to Maria Feodorovna, his widowed mother, and the second to Alexandra Feodorovna, the new empress.
It took almost a year to make each egg. As soon as the sketch was approved, a whole team of the firm's jewelers took over the work, the names of some of which have survived (so one should not say that the author of all of them is Carl Faberge). The contribution of the master Mikhail Perkhin is especially great. Also mentioned are August Holstrom, Henryk Wigstrom, Eric Collin,.
The series of imperial eggs was so famous that the Fabergé firm made several products for private customers (15 are known). Among them, a series of seven eggs, presented by the gold miner Alexander Ferdinandovich Kelkh to his wife, stands apart. The rest of the famous eight Faberge eggs were custom made for Felix Yusupov, nephew of Alfred Nobel, the Rothschilds, the Duchess of Marlborough and unidentified individuals. They are not as luxurious as the imperial ones, and they are not original, often repeating the type invented for royal gifts.
Perhaps some more products were made for private individuals, but they were never documented (unlike royal eggs), which leaves some freedom for skillful counterfeiters. An example of an unexpected discovery is the "Rothschild egg" put up for sale in the fall of 2007, which was ordered by representatives of the clan in the Faberge firm and was kept among the family property, without being advertised, for a whole century.