A hunt has started in Britain for an Easter egg worth £20 million (US$34 million), and the lucky owner has no idea of its value. Experts have said the Fabergé egg, lost for 90 years and then sold at auction in 1964, was not identified as being made by the famous Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé.
British newspaper The Telegraph reported the egg was said to be a gift from Tsar Alexander III to his wife Tsarina Maria Feodorovna in 1887 and is “decorated with diamond-encrusted ribbons of leaves and roses and three large sapphires.” It is also gold and gem-studded and contains a gold watch by Swiss watchmaker Vacheron & Constantin.
Known as a symbol of opulence and luxury, the last unrecorded Fabergé egg sold for US$18.5 million in 2007, setting an auction record, according to a Reuters article. That egg was translucent pink with a clock and animated diamond-set cockerel that popped up, flapped its wings, nodded its head, opened and shut its beak, and crowed every hour.
The egg was said by art experts to have been lost or destroyed until earlier this month, when a Fabergé enthusiast in America discovered an identical image of the egg in an auction catalogue from the 1960s, The Telegraph Reported.
Kieran McCarthy, a Fabergé expert from Wartski, the Mayfair jewelry firm, told The Telegraph, “This is an extraordinary discovery. Identifying one of the missing imperial eggs is incredibly exciting, and even more exciting that whoever has this piece will have no idea of its provenance and significance—nor will they know they are sitting on a royal relic, which could be worth £20 million.”
Tsar Alexander asked Fabergé to make one egg a year until his son, the next Tsar Nicholas II, ordered Fabergé to make two a year—one for his wife and one for his mother at Easter.
The tradition ended in 1917 when Nicholas was forced to abdicate, and the Bolsheviks executed him and his entire family.
By then, 50 such imperial Easter eggs had been made, although not all have survived. There were known to have been a maximum of 12 imperial standard eggs that were made for private clients.
“There is every chance this egg is somewhere in this country because even though it was not sold as Fabergé in the 1964 auction, a lot of Fabergé collectors and buyers of ‘Fabergé-style’ works of art were English collectors at the time,” McCarthy told The Telegraph.
British newspaper The Telegraph reported the egg was said to be a gift from Tsar Alexander III to his wife Tsarina Maria Feodorovna in 1887 and is “decorated with diamond-encrusted ribbons of leaves and roses and three large sapphires.” It is also gold and gem-studded and contains a gold watch by Swiss watchmaker Vacheron & Constantin.
Known as a symbol of opulence and luxury, the last unrecorded Fabergé egg sold for US$18.5 million in 2007, setting an auction record, according to a Reuters article. That egg was translucent pink with a clock and animated diamond-set cockerel that popped up, flapped its wings, nodded its head, opened and shut its beak, and crowed every hour.
The egg was said by art experts to have been lost or destroyed until earlier this month, when a Fabergé enthusiast in America discovered an identical image of the egg in an auction catalogue from the 1960s, The Telegraph Reported.
Kieran McCarthy, a Fabergé expert from Wartski, the Mayfair jewelry firm, told The Telegraph, “This is an extraordinary discovery. Identifying one of the missing imperial eggs is incredibly exciting, and even more exciting that whoever has this piece will have no idea of its provenance and significance—nor will they know they are sitting on a royal relic, which could be worth £20 million.”
Tsar Alexander asked Fabergé to make one egg a year until his son, the next Tsar Nicholas II, ordered Fabergé to make two a year—one for his wife and one for his mother at Easter.
The tradition ended in 1917 when Nicholas was forced to abdicate, and the Bolsheviks executed him and his entire family.
By then, 50 such imperial Easter eggs had been made, although not all have survived. There were known to have been a maximum of 12 imperial standard eggs that were made for private clients.
“There is every chance this egg is somewhere in this country because even though it was not sold as Fabergé in the 1964 auction, a lot of Fabergé collectors and buyers of ‘Fabergé-style’ works of art were English collectors at the time,” McCarthy told The Telegraph.
