Fabergé

Fabergé

The House of

Fabergé

Imperial artistry wrapped in wonder.

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The Master

Peter Carl Fabergé

1846 to 1920

  1. Peter Carl Fabergé was born in St. Petersburg in 1846, the son of a modest Baltic German jeweller.
  2. He took over the family workshop in 1872 and spent a decade studying the goldsmiths of Europe before he changed what a jewel could be.
  3. In 1885 Tsar Alexander III asked him for an Easter gift for the Empress, and Fabergé answered with an egg that opened.
  4. Over the next thirty one years his workshops produced fifty imperial eggs, each one a secret kept until the morning it was given.
  5. In 1918 the Bolsheviks took the House of Fabergé, and its founder left Russia for the last time, dying in Lausanne two years later.

The Patrons

House of Romanov

For three decades the House of Fabergé answered to one family. Alexander III commissioned the first egg in 1885 for his wife, Maria Feodorovna.

When he died in 1894 his son Nicholas II continued the tradition twice over, one egg each Easter for his mother and one for his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna.

Fabergé was given complete freedom on a single condition: every egg had to contain a surprise.