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Fabergé’s Eggs

Both sublime and ridiculous

Toby Faber
Macmillan, 324pp, £17.99,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Sam Leith reviews Toby Faber's history of Fabergé eggs

As many a revolutionary has remarked, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. It is close to a miracle that more of the eggs were not, indeed, simply broken up for materials — as an enormous amount of imperial jewellery was — before being sold abroad to allay the post-Revolutionary economic meltdown.

The eggs really got going in the States thanks to the PT-Barnum-like efforts of the late Armand Hammer (or, in his French nom-de-plume, Braset Martineau) — Reaganite, communist agent, fraud, oil baron, toothpaste-magnate, and the man responsible for stealing the Fabergé name to flog aftershave. While in Russia after the Revolution, Hammer cosied up to the Kremlin and obtained a number of the eggs at a knock-down price. When he returned to the US he made them the centrepieces of exhibits he touted round the department stores of the mid-west, an elaborate sales-pitch that eventually paid off.

It was not too long before the eggs — initially changing hands for far less in real terms than their original cost — were back on the road from department-store to auction house. They came once again to symbolise Tsarist levels of wealth — but this time in the American imperium. One early enthusiast, the Grape-Nut heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, responded to the Great Depression by putting her jewels in a strongbox: she was able to fund a canteen for New York’s unemployed with the savings she made on the insurance premiums.

As symbols of wealth, the Sixties and Seventies saw the eggs entering a Cold War great egg race as the bombastic billionaire Malcolm Forbes — a man who insisted on flying a private jet called ‘Capitalist Tool’ — struggled to amass a larger collection of imperial eggs than the Kremlin. Glasnost eventually saw most of the extant eggs united in a joint exhibition in Moscow. Now, the circle has closed: Russian oligarchs are buying them.

The flamboyance of the eggs always seemed to appeal to an answering flamboyance in their most devoted collectors: ‘One — a Mr Blair of Llandudno — would only acquire a new item if the lunar conditions were right.’ Violet van der Elst, who made her fortune selling a pseudo-Venetian cosmetic called ‘Doge Cream’, guarded her Fabergé collection with two Great Danes. At one point the greatest Fabergé collectors in the US were Jack and Belle Linsky, who had made their fortunes from the ‘Swingline’ stapler-loading mechanism. The Marquess of Anglesey was the owner of the world’s only Fabergé ping-pong shirt, emerald-studded and crafted to a design of his own.

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