A ll over the world, Christians celebrate the festival of Easter with delicious Easter eggs made of chocolate or filled with candy. One artist created the most beautiful Easter eggs the world has ever seen. He used gold and jewels and filled them with tiny, delightful surprises.
Royal inspiration
The artist’s name was Peter Carl Faberge (pronounced Fab-er- jay) and he made 50 different eggs for the emperors, or Tsars, of Russia. Peter Carl Faberge was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1846. His father was a goldsmith. From an early age, Peter Carl learned to work with gold and gemstones. As a young man, he travelled all over Europe and studied with goldsmiths in France, Germany, and England. When he returned to Saint Petersburg, he worked in the Faberge Company founded by his father. He was given the title of “master goldsmith” and ran the company after his father’s retirement.
The story of the Easter eggs started in 1885 when Tsar Alexander III decided to give his wife a golden egg as a present for Easter. The emperor asked Peter Carl to create a jewelled egg and even helped to design it. The egg looked almost like a real one on the outside. It was made of white enamel with a thin gold band around its middle. When it was opened, you found a yolk made of solid gold inside. When the yolk was opened up, it contained a beautiful hen made of gold, and when the hen was opened, it had a necklace with a tiny diamond crown and ruby egg. The Empress thought it was a wonderful Easter surprise and loved it so much that the Emperor asked Faberge to make an egg for his wife every year. The first egg was called the “Hen egg”. For the next 32 years until 1917, Faberge made an Easter egg with a new design every year. After Alexander III’s son Nicholas II became the Tsar, he had Faberge make an egg each for his wife and his mother. Each one contained a surprise and used beautiful gemstones, pearls, crystals, gold and diamonds. One of the eggs contained a tiny golden carriage. Another had lilies of the valley made of pearls. The egg was pink because that was the Empress’s favourite colour and lilies of the valley her favourite flower. One of the most expensive eggs was the “Winter egg”, which was built of very thin rock crystal and held a set of flowers made of quartz, gold, and garnets.
Each egg took almost a whole year to design and build. Many master craftsmen at the Faberge Company worked on it. Today, 43 eggs still survive and they sell for millions of dollars. By 1917, the Tsar was no longer the Emperor because of the Russian revolution. The Faberge family, was forced to leave Saint Petersburg, and settled in Switzerland. Peter Carl Faberge died in Switzerland in 1920.
You can see pictures of the beautiful eggs he created at this website:
http://www.faberge.com/news/49_imperial-eggs.aspx
