Recent Discoveries
The Missing Nécessaire Egg
"A Fine Gold Egg, richly set with diamonds, cabochon rubies, emeralds, a large coloured diamond at top and a cabochon sapphire at point. The interior is designed as an Etui with thirteen gold and diamond set implements." This is the description of item 20 under the heading 'Lent Anonymously' from the catalogue of a loan exhibition of the works of Carl Fabergé held at Wartski, 138, Regent Street, London W1, November 8-25,1949.
The story of this previously unidentified golden egg up until 1952 has now been pieced together by Kieran McCarthy of Wartski. His detective work was prompted by the opening up of the Russian archives in the 1990s, where a Fabergé invoice addressed to the Tsar for "Nécessaire Egg, Louis XV style, 1900 roubles, St. Petersburg 4th May 1889" was discovered in the Imperial ledgers. Two years later, an inventory of items in the Gatchina Palace recorded: "Egg decorated with stones, containing ladies toilet articles, 13 pieces." In 1917, items confiscated by the provisional government included a "gold nécessaire egg, decorated with precious stones", and, in 1922, "1 gold Nécessaire egg with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and 1 sapphire" was among the goods transferred to the Sovnarkom, the central agency in Moscow from where confiscated items were dispersed and sold off by the state.
Mr. McCarthy has been able to match these descriptions of the Nécessaire Egg with that of an object included by Wartski in the first ever exhibition in the West of works solely by Fabergé. Here, in 1949, many of the splendours of the Russian court were displayed—"relics of a dead civilization and a vanished Empire", as Sacheverell Sitwell wrote in the catalogue. At the time, the identity and Imperial provenance of the egg were unknown, and there's no indication of who owned it. Four other Imperial Easter eggs were the stars of the show.
Searching through Wartski's ledgers, Mr. McCarthy found an entry confirming that an object matching the description of the Nécessaire Egg was sold in 1952. The buyer was almost certainly British, and insisted on anonymity. Wartski observed absolute discretion and never recorded the name, and there is no record of it having being seen by anyone in the art world since.
But last year, Mr. McCarthy discovered the photographs taken at the 1949 exhibition. "When I saw the object on the bottom shelf of the cabinet, I knew in an instant that it had to be it. The detective work was an intellectual exercise, but the effect was physical—a spine-tingling rush of adrenalin, all concentrated on that square centimetre of print." The grainy images, which have been scanned and magnified, are the only known visual record of the missing Nécessaire Egg.
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Mr. McCarthy's story excerpted from Country Life, March 20, 2008, 60-1.
