The World's Most Beautiful Eggs: The Genius of Carl Faberge

On Easter morning, 1987,

the Empress of Russia discovered this extraordinary

diamond and ruby-encrusted egg on her breakfast table.

It was a gift from her husband, Tsar Nicholas II,

to commemorate their coronation the previous summer.

It had been made by the Imperial jewellers, the House of Faberge.

And there was a fantastic novelty inside -

a replica of the 18th-century Russian state coach.

The wheels are made of platinum, and it's diamond-encrusted.

That's quite a roof rack on there.

This was a miniature version of the coach in which the Empress

had travelled to the ceremony in Moscow.

This dazzling treasure, now known as the Coronation Egg,

has led a turbulent life since the demise of its original owners.

But in April 2004, it was listed for auction by Sotheby's in New York.

The upper estimate was an astonishing 24 million.

If it reached its estimate,

this one piece of Russian Imperial heritage would become

the most expensive item of decorative art ever sold at auction.

It was part of a collection of nine Imperial Easter eggs amassed

over the previous 40 years by the Forbes Foundation in New York.

But that sale never took place.

Just six weeks before the auction, the lots were withdrawn.

The international art world was stunned to discover that

a private sale had been agreed.

Oil and gas magnate Viktor Vekselberg

had bought all the eggs for an undisclosed sum.

I am about to meet my first Russian oligarch.

Viktor's not short of cash. He's worth something over 15 billion.

I wanted to ask him about this spectacular repatriation

of his nation's heritage, but he's a busy man.

Then, an hour ago, his people phoned and told me to come

to a central Moscow hotel.

'Viktor has a very impressive gallery here, displaying some

'of the pretty things he's collected since he came by his billions.'

Just between us, how much did you pay for those Faberge eggs?

Slightly more than 100 million.

And was it worth it, spending all that money?

If you ask me what valuation, what real price for that,

really, for me, it is difficult to say to you what it is.

But do you have a warm glow inside?

Absolutely. I have this warm glow, yes.

I can only imagine the warm glow you get from spending 100 million,

but how did an obscure Russian craftsman become

the most sought-after jeweller in Europe,

and why do the eggs fetch such astronomical prices?

Partly, it's their rarity.

Faberge made just 50 of these unique pieces,

each one reflecting a chapter in the life and loves of the Romanov tsars,

a ruling elite who seemed to be sleepwalking towards revolution.

But perhaps most significantly,

it was the man who created these extraordinary objects.

A man who took the artistry of jewellery-making to the very

limits of perfection, running a vast company that

catered for the most demanding clients,

supplying everything from a matchbox to a monumental mantelpiece clock.

Faberge worked in a world that is lost to us today. A world where a

single empire covered a sixth of the planet, spanning three continents.

A world that was ruled by one autocratic, omnipotent tsar,

whose story would be fused with his own.

A world where fastidious craftsmanship was prized above all else.

This was the world of Carl Faberge.

TRAIN HORN BLASTS

The Faberge story begins a generation before Carl worked for the tsars.

In 1860, his father, Gustav, left St Petersburg

and arrived with his young family in Dresden, in the Kingdom of Saxony.

At just 46, he had decided to retire,

leaving his jewellery shop in the charge of a trusted manager.

The impetus for his move west was the education of his young son, Peter Carl Faberge.

St Petersburg was Russia's window on the West. It was as western

as Russia was going to get, but it was still fundamentally

the capital of an Oriental Empire, with oriental tastes.

If Gustav Faberge wanted his son to understand Western art

and Western jewellery-making in particular,

he really did have to get outside Russia to do that.

The boy was only 14, but he was a chip off the old block,

or gemstone, exhibiting a precocious talent for jewellery-making.

Who knows, he might even one day eclipse his old man.

His father wanted to open his eyes to the finest that Western

civilisation had to offer,

and Dresden was the perfect place to start.

CHURCH BELL TOLLS

This was largely due to the modern sensibilities of its former ruler,

Augustus the Strong.

There was no shortage of art collections in Europe.

The trouble was, they tended to be the private playthings

of whichever king, prince or margrave ran the place at the time.

But the people of Dresden were very lucky with Augustus the Strong here,

because not only did he love his bling, he loved to show it off too.

In the 1720s, he took the exceptional step of opening his collection to the public.

Today, the Green Vaults of Dresden Castle still have

one of the largest collections of jewellery in Europe.

The most extraordinary pieces were made for Augustus in the early 18th century.

He seems to have been just as fond of precious stones

as he was of gold, and if you spend any time in these rooms,

it can easily become infectious.

It's hard to think of anywhere that would give a better opportunity

to an aspiring young craftsman like Carl Faberge

than this magnificent museum.

And we know that Faberge came here and studied its treasures minutely,

because some of the designs would reappear later in his creations.

Some 30 years after his teenage stay in Dresden, Carl made this egg

for Tsar Alexander III that was unmistakeably

a copy of this casket in the collection of the Green Vault.

Over the next few years, Carl Faberge criss-crossed Europe,

absorbing what he could from the great jewellery collections of the continent.

He also spent time in Frankfurt as an apprentice to a goldsmith.

At all events, by 1864, Carl Faberge, now 18,

had absorbed all he could from the great treasure houses of Europe.

It was time to go home.

When Carl Faberge returned to the city of his birth,

the vast Russian Empire stretched from Poland to Alaska.

A nation of 120 million people of varying race, religion and language.

St Petersburg was unlike any other city in the Empire.

It was a purpose-built Imperial capital whose wide streets and classical architecture

took inspiration from the elegant cities of western Europe.

At the centre of the city was the official residence of the Tsar,

the Winter Palace.

And just a few hundred metres away, at 11 Bolshaya Morskaya Street,

was his father's shop.

This is now a branch of a well-known fast food chain, but back in 1864,

it was Faberge's workshops, producing brooches,

necklaces and cases for cigarettes and spectacles.

They were well-respected, but there was little to distinguish them from their competitors,

and despite the fact that the Winter Palace was just around the corner,

they weren't doing any business with the Tsar and his family either.

But this was a great opportunity for Carl.

He began to haunt the vast halls of the Hermitage Museum,

which took up a considerable part of the palace,

and since the 1850s, had been open to the public, allowing the masses

to gaze in awe at the accumulated wealth of the Romanov Dynasty.

Initially, Carl paid his kopecks for admittance along with

everyone else, but before long, he was working as an unpaid volunteer,

restoring the jewellery in the Imperial collection.

He was particularly interested in a newly-discovered hoard of gold

artefacts, made in the 4th century BC, that were being excavated

in the town of Kerch, on the Black Sea coast.

Faberge got permission to catalogue and restore these items,

and eventually, to do his own replicas of them.

This was a stroke of business genius for him because these pieces would

turn out to be very popular with the Russian public.

The jewellery had some of the most remarkable, fine goldwork in it

that had really not been done since.

By trying to replicate it, Faberge developed

the skills of the jewellers who were working for him,

and he also developed his own design skills at the same time.

It wasn't long before these new design skills got him noticed.

Now you'll just have to use your imagination here for a second.

This is Khodynka Field, in the suburbs of Moscow, and it was

the site of the All-Russian Exhibition of the arts and sciences.

For four months back in 1882, this field was covered by 80 pavilions.

The largest of them - 10,000 square metres -

was devoted to art and academic progress.

And it was here that Carl Faberge hooked his most important client.

The merchants of Moscow had developed their own taste

for what became known as "Russian style", looking back to the crafts

that existed before Peter the Great began to westernise his Empire.

Faberge's replicas put his firm in the vanguard of the taste

for this Russian style.

But this vogue for a pure, pre-Romanov,

Russian heritage had an unlikely champion - it was the Tsar himself.

Physically, Alexander III was huge and he was strong. He was a great

big bear of a man, and after his father's bloody assassination,

he came to the throne absolutely determined to be an autocrat.

As he famously said, "Only God and I will decide what's good for Russia."

Alexander was fiercely patriotic, and at the exhibition, a Faberge

replica of an ancient gold bracelet caught his eye.

It was shown alongside the original from the Hermitage Museum,

and for Alexander, it was proof that Russia was still producing

supremely talented craftsmen.

Alexander III said he couldn't spot any difference

between Faberge's reproduction and the original bracelet.

He was smitten.

So much so, that the Empress purchased of a pair of cufflinks

from the Faberge collection for her husband.

They were illustrated with a motif of cicadas,

also copied from the Kerch collection.

They were supposed to represent good luck.

But it was the seller, not the purchaser, who was the lucky one.

BELL TOLLS

The House of Faberge was now firmly on the Imperial radar.

As the Tsar buttoned his cuffs in the morning, he'd have been

reminded of the home-grown talent he had discovered.

But it would be one particular Russian tradition that

cemented the relationship with the Romanovs.

CHORAL SINGING

No sitting down in a Russian church.

The most important religious festival in the Russian calendar,

and the occasion for the giving of gifts,

was not Christmas, but Easter.

The faithful would leave the church on Easter morning declaring, "Christ is risen",

heading home for breakfast, when presents would be exchanged.

Homes were decorated with brightly-painted eggs.

In 1885, the imperial family spent the night in the chapel

at the Winter Palace, but the egg that the Empress, Maria Feodorovna,

received after breakfast that Easter was unique.

It had been made by Carl Faberge.

This is where it all began - the original Faberge egg.

This is one of the eggs that Viktor bought.

Inside the smooth enamel shell is a golden yolk, and inside that is

the hen that gave the egg it's name. Its eyes are rubies.

The hen originally contained a ruby pendant,

but sadly, that is now missing.

This egg was another example of Faberge's skill

at copying from an antique original, in this case,

one with a very personal message from Alexander to his wife.

Before her marriage, Maria Feodorovna had been

Princess Dagmar of Denmark, and her Easter present was

an affectionate reminder of her homeland.

It's based on a similar egg in the Danish Royal Collection which

Maria would have known from her childhood.

Little could she have imagined as she fondled her chicken on that

Easter Sunday morning that this was the start of something huge.

The Tsar was delighted,

and made Faberge an official supplier to the Imperial Court.

His company drew on the very best artisans from across the city,

all labouring under his guidance with the single aim

of producing work of exceptional quality.

A great part of Faberge's success was the structure of his business.

It would be wrong to think that this success was

the work of a lone genius toiling in his attic.

In fact, Carl Faberge had no hands-on role in the making of

his extraordinary objects. He was the mastermind who made it possible.

Faberge himself was top dog of the business,

or should I say "top doll"?

He was the figurehead who brought in the trade, often playing

a key role in designing the extraordinary objects that left the workshop.

But, above all, he was a very talented administrator.

Under him in the structure were the workmasters.

Now these were semi-independent craftsmen, each one a specialist

in a particular area of jewellery-making.

And they ran the workshop on behalf of Faberge.

The people who actually worked at the bench meticulously

assembling these items were members of the workmasters' teams,

and they would typically have spent their entire working lives in those workshops.

At the bottom of the chain were the apprentices.

These were the poor saps who swept the floors and stoked the boilers.

The company was expanding rapidly,

and while this was partly due to the entrepreneurial skills of Carl Faberge,

it was also a consequence of a boom in the Russian economy.

The Russian oligarch is not a new phenomenon.

In the 1880s and '90s, merchants and business magnates were on the rise.

Railways were built, oil,

coal and steel production increased manyfold.

Foreign banks set up in St Petersburg, willing to lend

capital to help expand businesses like Faberge's.

Russia was in a whirlwind of growth.

Faberge took full advantage.

The variety of products the firm was now producing for the Russian

nouveau riche was extraordinary.

He was very versatile. He used his brain.

He was not only making high-end jewellery,

he immediately spotted what would appeal to the public.

When electricity became installed in Russia,

he had bell pushers, electric bell pushers.

Of course, at that time, it was easier to have a servant.

Nowadays, I think you can buy a bell pusher, nobody will come.

People used to smoke the Russian cigarettes, which were long.

He made the cigarette cases corresponding to those cigarettes.

When safety matches arrived,

he also made a space in his cigarette case for the matches.

If he were alive today, there are so many new

and interesting things he'd make.

Cases for cellphones,

he would make things also for the iPads

and for all sorts of technological things.

I am sure that would have attracted him.

But every Faberge customer knew he was buying more than an

over-decorated domestic knick-knack.

He was shopping where the Tsar went shopping.

Alexander's commitment to the firm grew.

Each year, he commissioned another egg for Maria Feodorovna.

Some are lost today, but those that remain reveal how Faberge

developed a close relationship with the Empress,

which enabled him to personalise his creations.

This one, for example, from 1890, contained a ten-panel

miniature screen illustrating the Danish palaces of her youth.

Or the Memory of Azov Egg,

commemorating the warship in which their son, Nicholas, was serving.

Each egg that Faberge made for the imperial family represented

months of dedicated work.

Today in St Petersburg, Andre Ananov makes commemorative eggs

in homage to Carl Faberge,

and these rooms give us a sense of what the workshops

in Bolshaya Morskaya must have been like.

His latest creation has already taken him over a year to make.

You see St Petersburg, the capital of Russia,

unique city, historical buildings.

-That's St Isaac's, is it?

-Absolutely. It is the cathedral.

And there's different, very important buildings.

All the stylistic notes that made Carl Faberge's eggs distinctive

are here on Andre's creation.

Inside are diamond-studded replicas of the Imperial Crown Jewels.

The surface of the egg is covered in Faberge's signature decoration,

guilloche enamelling.

This is created using a machine called a rose engine

that cuts a pattern of closely parallel lines on the metal surface

onto which the enamel is applied.

Like Andre's eggs,

the ones Faberge produced often took more than 12 months to make,

so his work-masters found themselves creating the next egg

before the one for that year had even been delivered.

Life in the Imperial household in Saint Petersburg

was a very insular existence, a far cry from that of the peasants

who made up over 80% of the Tsar's subjects,

living out in the seemingly endless expanse of the Russian countryside.

In the winter of 1891, in large parts of the Empire,

the harvest failed.

As many as two and a half million people died.

The crisis was a turning point in the history of Russia.

The failure of the Tsarist regime to respond effectively

to the death of so many of its people would provide

a fertile ground for those who were sowing the seeds of revolution.

In Saint Petersburg, however, the famine had minimal effect.

Life in the Winter Palace continued very much as it always had.

On Easter morning, 1894,

Maria Feodorovna received her tenth Faberge egg.

This is the Renaissance Egg.

It's based on the casket Faberge had seen in the Green Vaults

during his time in Dresden as a teenager.

He's adapted it a bit for his client.

The date is picked out in the lid in diamonds, but it's still

a pretty close copy of the one owned by Augustus the Strong.

But in a display of virtuosity and panache,

Faberge makes crucial changes.

He has used a far more extensive range of enamel colours

than the original displays.

And with painstaking attention to detail, he's also given the gold

lattice-work on the lid a subtle curve to emphasise its egg shape.

I'm sure Augustus would have been green with envy.

This should have been a period of great happiness

for the Imperial family.

Their eldest son and heir, Nicholas, had just got engaged to

Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria.

But that Easter brought bad news too.

Alexander III was suffering from a kidney complaint

and he would die the following autumn at the age of 49.

His son, Nicholas II, only 26,

was wholly unprepared for the role he now had to take on.

The Orthodox church geared up for month of ceremonial pageantry.

In quick succession, the new Tsar buried his father,

got married in the Grand Church of the Winter Palace,

and assumed the reigns of power.

Nicholas II could be forgiven for feeling uneasy

by the sudden turn of events.

His wife was widely considered to be German,

a nationality viewed with great distrust by Russians,

and there were dark mutterings about the fact that she made her bow

in the city in mourning, walking behind a coffin.

Was she an omen of bad luck?

The Coronation of the Tsar traditionally took place

in the old capital Moscow, and in 1896, after 18 months

of mourning for his father, Nicholas and Alexandra travelled on the

Imperial train from the aristocratic stronghold of Saint Petersburg

for a far more uncertain reception from their Muscovite subjects.

The five-hour service over there in the Uspensky Cathedral,

inside the Kremlin, was marred by further incidents

which led to murmurings amongst superstitious onlookers.

First, the Foreign Minister suffered a stroke and dropped down dead

just as their majesties arrived.

Then, as Nicholas himself went to the sanctuary to receive communion,

the clasp on the Order of St Andrew,

with which he had just been invested broke, and it fell to the floor.

But the events of the next few days were to do devastating harm

to his reputation.

A great celebration was to be held here at Khodynka Field,

and it was rumoured that a modest goodie bag would be distributed.

The largesse of the new Tsar extended to a bread roll,

a piece of sausage, a slice of gingerbread,

and a commemorative cup, but as the crowd grew,

a rumour spread that there wouldn't be enough for everybody.

There was pushing and shoving in the queues and a panic ensued

in which almost 1,400 people were trampled to death.

Nicholas, showing the indecisiveness that blighted his reign,

couldn't decide whether to attend a ball at the French Embassy

that evening, but was finally persuaded to go.

The people of Moscow saw their Tsar partying in all his finery whilst so

many of his subjects were lying in mortuaries and hospital beds nearby.

What should have been a celebration of the start of his reign

had inadvertently provided ammunition

for those who sought to bring it to an end.

That Faberge chose to commemorate the Coronation with his Easter egg

the following year was one of his less-inspired ideas.

As we've already seen, the Coronation Egg is hard to beat.

The stunning shade of translucent lime yellow enamel is applied

over a pattern of guilloche sunbursts,

with a green gold trellis of laurel leaves.

But the triumph of this egg was the surprise it contained.

That miniature replica of the golden state coach

in which Alexandra rode to the ceremony.

The coach inside the egg is exquisite.

Unfortunately what it would have reminded her of is the fact

that her mother-in-law rode in a rather more magnificent coach

ahead of her, according to Russian precedence,

receiving cheers from the Russian populous, while Alexandra herself

was greeted only with silence as a German interloper.

Amongst the guests attending the Coronation

were our own Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII,

and his son, the Duke of York, the future George V.

It seemed the British Royal Family would be just as seduced by Faberge

as their Russian cousins.

They bought lots of pieces

and George V, as Duke of York, wrote in his diary,

"Visited Faberge's shop, you know, bought half the contents."

Queen Victoria was really the first reigning British monarch

to acquire pieces of Faberge.

Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna

had spent some time with Queen Victoria up at Balmoral

in the autumn of 1896 and following the visit, that Christmas,

they sent this present to Queen Victoria.

The thing about Faberge is it is absolutely sublime quality.

You never see a dud piece of Faberge.

Queen Victoria decided to use it, at the time of her Diamond Jubilee

in 1897, and it was signed by all the principal guests.

It's the guilloche enamelling that Faberge is particularly known for.

The surface of the metal is engraved.

That is overlaid with six or seven layers of enamel.

Faberge, in fact, produced enamel in 142 different colours.

That's more colours than any other craftsman ever managed to produce

either before or since.

And each layer is polished by hand for hours to get this absolutely

translucent finish but the result and very, very rich.

Those skills, and that level of craftsmanship, does not exist today.

Since the assassination of Alexander III,

the Imperial family had been far less visible to the ordinary people

they governed, spending more and more time at the Alexander Palace

in the rural village of Tsarskoye Selo, 20 miles south of the capital.

It meant a trek out of town for Carl, but one he knew

was worth making if his Imperial commissions were to continue.

Faberge had developed a very good relationship with

the dowager Empress Maria,

over the many years in which he was her favourite jeweller,

and the eggs he made for her

showed great insight into the kind of things that would appeal to her.

But the new Empress was an altogether trickier customer.

Hidden away as she was here in Tsarskoye Selo for long periods,

it was difficult for him to get to know her,

but after his faux-pas of 1897 he was determined to put things right

and restore his reputation in the eyes of his most important client.

And this was his response - the Lilly of the Valley Egg,

also now owned by Viktor Vekselberg.

The Russians would refer to this as Stil Moderne,

more familiar to us as Art Nouveau, and Alexandra loved it.

There are classic Faberge touches.

The egg itself is worked in guilloche,

covered in an unusual pink enamel,

but the sensuously curling fronds of the lilies, with their diamond

and pearl buds appealed directly to Alexandra's love of cut flowers.

But Faberge had discovered another theme to entrance the Empress,

her growing family.

A catch on the side of the egg releases three pop-up pictures

of her husband and two daughters.

Faberge's flirtation with the Stil Moderne may have been

an immense success with Alexandra Feodorovna, but he was about to have

his creations tested in a much more demanding arena.

In 1900, the latest Exposition Universelle took place

in the very birthplace of Art Nouveau.

Carl Faberge was now, by some margin, the most successful

jeweller in Russia, but how would he be seen on the world stage?

Paris could be a fairly intimidating place

to enter an international competition,

especially in a field the French considered their own,

like bijouterie.

But, as it happened, Carl had nothing to fear from Paris.

For reasons entirely unconnected to his prowess or otherwise with a

gemstone, being Russian in this city in 1900 was a very cool thing to be.

France was feeling a bit unloved by her neighbours.

She was surrounded by the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy

and Austria-Hungary, and the entente cordiale with Britain

was still some way in the future.

Into this breach had stepped the Russians,

and in 1894, the Franco-Russian Alliance was signed.

This bridge, which is considered the most beautiful in Paris,

was created in honour of the Tsar who signed that alliance,

Alexander III.

At the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the French went Russian mad.

For their part, the Russians did put on a great show.

They built a mini Moscow here, complete with a pseudo-Kremlin,

a Russian village, and an Orthodox Church.

Innovations abounded.

Moving around the enormous exhibition site

was facilitated by the world's first mechanical pavements,

a system of wooden people movers that ran along elevated tracks.

Just about every country in the world was represented.

The decorative arts were exhibited in front of the Hotel des Invalides,

in an avenue of temporary classical arcades.

Faberge's stand drew a crowd every day.

His Imperial Majesty had graciously consented

to lend three of his Easter eggs to the Faberge stand,

including the Lilly of the Valley egg.

Like everything else Russian, Faberge was praised to the skies.

He was invited to sit on the panel of judges that gave out the prizes

and, at the end of the Expo,

he was awarded the nation's highest decoration, the Legion d'Honour.

Every item the firm had brought to Paris was sold.

And there was something else the Russians were very proud of in 1900,

but it was too big to bring to France.

That year saw the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway,

which was, and remains, the longest railway line in the world.

In the Russian Pavilion an elaborate Trans-Siberian Experience

was staged, recreating the journey from Moscow to Beijing.

The punters would sit in stationary railway carriages and watch through

the windows as this vast painted panorama rushed past outside.

And ever since they showed it in Paris in 1900,

it's been locked away here, in the Hermitage Museum.

This wonderful great roll could only have appeared when it did,

at that precise moment in time, because a few years later,

cinema would have made an enterprise like this redundant.

One thing this would have shown, though,

is just how vast the Russian Empire was.

At the same time as this great panorama was being painted,

Carl would have been working on the 1900 Easter gift.

He was just as impressed by this monumental feat of Russian

engineering, and I can imagine what he would have thought.

"You know what? This would make a great egg."

The egg presented by the Tsar to his wife on Easter morning 1900

was as beautiful as ever, in green and red enamel,

embellished with rubies, pearls and rose-cut diamonds,

and inside was a tiny golden train set - the Trans-Siberian, in an egg.

Clever Carl had scored another hit.

All right, that's good for me, you can roll it up again now.

Thank you.

1900 was quite a year for Carl and his business.

Back in Saint Petersburg there were important new developments

in Bolshaya Morskaya Street.

At some point in the early 20th century, Faberge became

almost certainly the biggest jewellery business in the world.

This ever-expanding enterprise continued to operate from

the same street here in Saint Petersburg

where old Gustav Faberge had first set up his shop.

But, my, how things had changed.

The success of the House of Faberge

meant Carl was able to move into purpose-built headquarters.

Retail at ground level,

design, manufacture and mail order on the higher floors,

and at the very top a spacious apartment for Carl himself,

with the last word in luxurious appointments.

These days the shop is selling jewellery once more,

and the original layout has been recreated.

Visitors in its heyday

described the warm and brilliant interior of the shop.

One great innovation that flourished in these new premises

was Faberge's pioneering use of mail order.

He was always plotting interesting possibilities.

The railroad system expanded then and things could be sent.

I think the post was more efficient than it is now.

They already at that time had zip codes.

There were now stores in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa,

and in 1903, the first, and only international branch was

opened in London, largely due to the spending habits of just one man.

I think Edward VII really caught the bug for Faberge from his wife,

but it was very much through their patronage of Faberge that

Carl Faberge decided to open a branch of the firm in London.

He placed the only direct commission with the firm, which was

to have the wonderful animals modelled by Faberge's modellers.

There was great excitement around this commission

because Faberge sent his best sculptors all the way from

St Petersburg to model the animals which were done in wax initially.

And his dog Caesar we see here immortalised in

this beautiful carving in chalcedony with ruby eyes

and also with a gold collar enamelled with the words,

"I belong to the King,"

which is exactly what the dog had on his collar in real life.

Today the Royal Collection also owns the Basket of Flowers Egg,

the 1901 gift from Nicholas to Alexandra.

These are some of the flowers that would have been growing in Russia

in the spring and summer.

The spring and summer in Russia was so short.

The Tsarina was particularly fond of Faberge's flowers.

I think it's just a wonderful reminder of spring, of birth,

renewal, growth,

and entirely appropriate for an Easter present as this is.

The world of Carl Faberge was now an extraordinarily rarefied one.

The shop in Bolshaya Morskaya Street dispatched exotic gifts

to every crowned head on the planet -

a jewelled sabre for the Negus of Abyssinia,

a magnifying glass for the King of Siam,

even the Dalai Lama had a Faberge ring, a gift from the Tsar.

The Imperial warrant as jeweller to the Romanovs

was still the gold standard that underpinned his reputation.

But in 1904 and 1905, no eggs were presented at Easter.

Faberge might have been thriving,

but his most celebrated client had other things on his mind.

Russia became involved in a disastrous war with Japan,

10,000 kilometres away in the South Pacific,

in which the Russian Navy was all but annihilated.

Back home, growing discontent at the course of the war,

and anger at the lack of any sign of democratic reform

led to frequent strikes and civil unrest.

In January 1905, a general strike was called in Saint Petersburg,

and a large procession of factory workers

headed for the Winter Palace.

The marchers sang patriotic songs, including God Save The Tsar,

but their way was blocked here at the Narva Gate by soldiers

with orders not to let them pass.

Warning shots failed to disperse the crowd,

so the soldiers began firing directly on the marchers themselves,

killing several hundreds of them.

The Tsar wasn't even in residence at the Winter Palace,

having left for Tsarskoye Selo at the first sign of unrest.

The incident inflamed an already restive nation.

Insurrection broke out across the Empire.

The military defeat in the Pacific

led to mutinies in the armed forces - revolution was preached,

and for next few months, Russia was poised on the brink of civil war.

Ultimately, Nicholas capitulated.

It came to an end soon after Nicholas signed the October manifesto

in which he agreed to the existence of a Russian parliament,

a parliament with limited powers, but it could have been the first step

on the road to a constitutional monarchy in Russia.

It's doubtful whether or not Nicholas himself ever saw it that way.

Certainly at the same time as he was signing the manifesto,

his government was continuing with some brutal repression and really,

in the end, perhaps what it was doing was creating a focus for discontent

and storing up problems for the future.

It was a bitter moment, though.

He wrote in his diary that he was,

"Sick with shame at this betrayal of the dynasty."

The Romanovs' increasingly isolated life at the Alexander Palace

centred more and more on the family.

This was reflected in the Easter eggs that Carl Faberge made

when his regular order was resumed.

Two of these family-themed eggs are now in the British Royal Collection.

The Colonnade Egg is a mantelpiece clock, and was the Easter gift

from Nicholas to Alexandra in 1910.

Can I play with it or not?

Prince Michael of Kent is the great-great-grandson

of Tsar Alexander II...

It's very heavy...

..and a lifelong fan of Faberge.

The Cupid here on top represents the Tsarevich, Alexis.

Inside the columns are two doves,

which represent the Tsar and Tsarina,

who were very close all their lives.

And these four silver gilt cherubs

represent the Tsar's four daughters -

Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia

and they were known as OTMA for short, which was their initials.

And it's a wonderful piece of work.

Exquisite workmanship

and extraordinary gift for striking the right note.

This is the Mosaic Egg,

which is probably the most technically demanding

of all the eggs Faberge made.

The whole frame or shell of it, if you like, is made of platinum.

The framework of this, obviously being the shape it is,

is a very complex thing.

Each and every tiny, tiny stone had to be specially shaped.

It must have been the most painstaking work.

Inside was what they call the surprise. Faberge love surprises.

Made of ivory and painted with the Tsar's five children.

This pale blue guilloche Faberge frame,

shows the youngest child, Alexis,

but their joy at the birth of a male heir,

was soon overshadowed by the discovery that he had haemophilia.

The interesting thing of course is that the Tsarevich,

being their only son,

was very important to them because the daughters were unable to inherit.

The Tsardom always went through the male line.

In 1913,

the Romanov dynasty celebrated 300 years as Tsars of Russia.

Nicholas was still in constant conflict with the Duma,

the parliament he'd been forced to accept in 1905,

and his wife's unpopularity was compounded by dark mutterings

about her close relationship with the monk, Grigori Rasputin.

An extensive tour of the Empire was planned,

which culminated in a ceremonial entrance into Moscow,

but by the time they arrived here, their fears had been allayed.

This tour reinforced their belief

that talk of their unpopularity was just a myth.

After all, their reception was rapturous,

cheering crowds lined their route

and people actually fell to the ground

and kissed the shadow of the Tsar as he passed by.

The reassurance Nicholas felt from his reception on this tour

was further reinforced

by Carl Faberge's Easter confection that year.

Now on display in the Kremlin Armoury Museum,

the Tercentenary Egg was undoubtedly a masterpiece.

There's an aggressive symbolism about it,

beginning at the base with the golden two-headed Russian eagle.

It's effectively supporting 18 miniature portraits

of the Romanov Tsars.

You can see the lineage running from Michael I,

encompassing Catherine the Great,

Alexander III and culminating in Nicholas II himself.

Each one is framed with diamonds, 1,115 in total,

and the various crowns of his dominions

are chased in gold between the portraits.

All the materials from which it is made,

the differently coloured golds, the steel, the diamonds,

topaz and rock crystal, were all sourced from within his vast Empire.

And the bill?

21,300 roubles, at a time when the average wage of a working Russian

was around 500 roubles a year.

However buoyed up Nicholas was about his popularity

after the Tercentenary tour, it was short-lived.

In 1914, Russia couldn't avoid becoming entangled

in the outbreak of the First World War,

and very quickly began to suffer catastrophic losses.

The following year, with 1,400,000 Russians already dead,

Nicholas left St Petersburg for the front

to take personal charge of his army.

But this time, war or no war,

Faberge continued to receive orders for eggs each Easter.

The Steel Military Egg was Alexandra's Easter present

in 1916. It's a wartime austerity model,

that could have been inspired by the Italian futurists.

It looks like a land mine,

primed to explode when the Imperial Crown is touched.

Now, on the face of it

you might expect her to be rather disappointed with this,

a reminder that her husband was at the front.

On the contrary yet again, the subtle perception

for which the jeweller was known came into its own.

She was extremely proud of her husband

for leading the nation at war

and she was very pleased with her egg.

The surprise inside showed Nicholas and his son, Alexis,

both in uniform, poring over military maps.

Not surprisingly, Nicholas was no better at running an army

than he had been at running his country.

His role as commander-in-chief that this egg was made to commemorate,

proved to be a disaster for Russia.

All the problems that had been unsatisfactorily dealt with

in 1905 surfaced again, and this time

Nicholas had very little to offer by way of shoring up his reputation.

The Steel Military Egg has another significant claim to fame, though.

This would prove to be the last egg

Faberge ever created for the Romanovs.

Work did begin on the eggs for Easter 1917,

but they were never completed.

On 2nd March,

Nicholas abdicated as Autocrat and Tsar of all the Russians.

For Carl Faberge, 30 years of sustained creativity,

inspiring 50 variations on one simple theme

in the most precious of materials,

employing craftsmanship at the very limits of perfection,

came to an abrupt and tragic end.

Whilst chaos took hold in his former Empire,

Nicholas and his family were held under guard

at the Alexander Palace. An appeal to his cousin, King George V,

for asylum in Britain, was declined.

The Romanov family left Tsarskoye Selo for the last time

through these doors.

They were taken into exile in Siberia.

'A year later, they were murdered.'

ARCHIVE: 'The masters take charge of their destiny

'with rifles, bayonets, machine guns. The Bolsheviks seize power.'

The Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war

brought mixed fortunes for Carl himself.

There was a frenzied rush amongst the nobility to convert their cash

into more easily tradable jewellery.

Carl admitted that,

despite the lack of fuel and bread, he was doing flourishing business.

Leon Trotsky had him listed as a war profiteer

and eventually the commissars arrived

to take his business from him.

He asked for ten minutes to collect his hat, say goodbye to his staff

and quit Bolshaya Morskaya Street for good.

Carl's wife and their eldest son, Eugene,

escaped to the West in the most dramatic fashion.

Travelling by sledge through the forests

and across the frozen Gulf of Finland,

they made their way to Switzerland.

Carl himself escaped separately,

evading capture on a similarly hazardous journey.

The story is that Carl Faberge escaped St Petersburg

on possibly the last train to leave for the West,

disguised as a member of the British Legation.

If it's true, then it's interesting to think

that the British were prepared to help Faberge the jeweller

in a way which George V

was not prepared to help his cousin, Nicholas Romanov.

This most meticulous of craftsmen

died on 24th September 1920 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

He was 74.

Rather sentimentally, perhaps, his family gave the cause of death

as a broken heart.

One member of the Faberge family

was missing from the bedside when Carl died.

His second son, Agathon, had failed to escape.

My grandfather, he didn't want to leave,

and like most of the people,

he could not believe that this was the end.

He was a gemmologist, an expert in stones.

When the revolution started,

he was put into jail and kept there

to appraise all the jewellery which they had requisitioned

from the Tsar and the rich families.

This is Agathon Faberge's country estate,

or at least, what's left of it.

When you were in the kind of turmoil like that,

there's not much you can do against it.

He was lucky not to have been executed, I think.

Agathon would never see his father again.

He wasn't released from prison until 1925.

His work assessing the Crown Jewels was pointless.

Isolated from the outside world,

he didn't allow for the colossal devaluation of the rouble,

which by the time he was released,

had fallen to one fifty-millionth of its pre-war value.

But however wide of the mark Agathon's valuations were,

in the late 1920s, a hard-up Stalin was determined to capitalise

on the Romanov treasures.

Despite the mass of items that Faberge had created

in his working life, I think he would have regarded

his greatest achievement as those 50 Imperial Easter Eggs.

But now his clients were dead and the eggs forgotten,

locked away in the Kremlin Armoury with the rest of the Crown Jewels.

In 1927, almost in secrecy,

Stalin began to sell and the eggs began to appear in the West.

But the market for Russian jewellery became flooded

in the wake of the revolution -

a situation to which even the once-coveted name of Faberge

was not immune.

The Depression of the 1930s sent values crashing to an all-time low.

The original Faberge Hen Egg,

the Easter gift which had delighted Maria Feodorovna in 1885,

was sold at Christie's in London.

It fetched just £85.

73 years later, in the same auction room,

Faberge's Rothschild Egg of 1902 sold for £8.9 million.

This extraordinary turnaround in the value of the eggs

was, in large part,

due to a New York magazine publisher, Malcolm Forbes.

Malcolm Forbes is a very attractive character, really.

He had a famous saying,

"He who dies with the most toys, wins,"

and on that basis Malcolm Forbes definitely won.

He'd been fascinated by Faberge from a young age,

the idea that here it was,

associated with the decadence of the Romanov Empire,

and he was always partial for a bit of decadence himself.

In a 40-year spending spree,

Malcolm refused to be outbid,

ending up with nine Imperial Eggs,

more than any private individual had owned

since the Romanovs themselves.

Malcolm Forbes almost single-handedly established the market for the eggs

in his lifetime and really set them up

for the cultural and iconic value that they have today.

When his sons decided to sell his collection after Forbes' death,

the world salivated at the prospect

that so many of these now legendary icons of fabulous wealth

were to be sold in one glittering event.

But as we know, history was cheated of this final reckoning.

Viktor Vekselburg intervened.

Viktor established the Link of Times Foundation

to look after his eggs, along with these more modest Faberge items.

One day he plans to open a museum

to put all his Russian art on display to the public.

This is the result of maybe, like, 15 years of collecting.

I was curious to know why Viktor felt it was important

to spend his money on cultural heritage.

Other people in your position might have bought something else,

like, I don't know, a football club in London?

Faberge eggs, this is part of Russian history and Russian culture.

I never holded even one egg in my house, never.

In our apartment, in our house, it would look terrible

if I put some Imperial Eggs in my buffet or something.

Faberge, for me, is maybe one of the toppest level of jewellery art.

This is real, when you see this is so beautiful technology,

so beautiful works, so many details,

I even don't believe that anybody in that time

can to repeat it, even they will be using so high-tech technology,

-new material or something...

-Lasers, yeah...

..impossible. This is so, just like, unique product

and I think this is real, real art.

The mystique of the eggs continues to resonate.

These greatest creations of a master jeweller

are perhaps uniquely representative of a kind of unimaginable wealth,

charged in a powerful collision of uselessness and beauty,

a supernova of money, art and craftsmanship.

On 17th July 1998, exactly 80 years after they were murdered,

the newly-identified remains of the last Tsar and his family

were finally buried, amongst the ancestral tombs of the Romanovs.

But Carl Faberge won't be coming back to St Petersburg.

In a way, he belongs to all of us now,

and his inventive genius

has given us unbeatable benchmark of human achievement.

The world of Carl Faberge is our world, too.

As for Carl himself, he has his place in the sun all right -

he's buried in Cannes in the French Riviera.

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