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00:00At an antique store in London,
00:28a remarkable discovery has been made that has thrown light
00:32on the bloody end of the Tsars of Russia and the birth of the Soviet Union.
00:38Well, it was a miracle.
00:40We were here at Wortski and in through that very door behind you,
00:44walked a gentleman.
00:46He was the most unassuming, unprepossessing individual,
00:49but in his hands he had a sheaf of photographs.
00:52This mysterious stranger had pictures of a lost treasure
00:58made by the legendary Karl Fabergé,
01:01a master jeweller and favourite of the Russian Imperial Court.
01:08Like the Romanovs,
01:10Fabergé himself would ultimately be a victim of the terrifying Russian Revolution.
01:15And one of his greatest creations would go missing for a century,
01:19having to survive two world wars and a precarious trip to America
01:24before pictures of it finally made their way to London.
01:29This has been the target of our dreams for so long
01:32that I recognise it instantaneously.
01:34But of course, as an antique dealer, your first reaction is no.
01:38You doubt everything.
01:40But looking at the images and then looking at him,
01:43it had to be true.
01:46Fifty Imperial Fabergé eggs are known to have been made.
01:50Could one of the missing ones have finally been found?
01:54Of course, we couldn't confirm that until we'd handled the object itself.
02:08St. Petersburg, Russia.
02:12It was in 1917, in this elegant city on the Baltic Sea,
02:17that the story of the Karl Fabergé company
02:19and their legendary Imperial eggs came to a crashing end.
02:24This is where you made them.
02:29The workshop's downstairs.
02:31We designed, we used to design our products in here.
02:39The eggs.
02:41Not just commissions from His Majesty.
02:44Citizen Romanov.
02:49Citizen Romanov.
02:51It's a time capsule, it's a portal.
02:53I mean, in Russian history we have this fault line of 1917
02:56and each and every one of these pieces catapults us back to that time
03:01when there were beautiful Grand Duchesses,
03:03a Haemophiliac heir, a mystical Rasputin
03:06and all of these people who were annihilated.
03:09I saw them once.
03:12The eggs.
03:15I was a boy.
03:17My grandfather took me to your exhibition.
03:20Each one of these pieces tie us back to an aristocracy,
03:23a religion, a system of governing that's absolutely gone
03:28and they're the only tangible evidence that these people ever lived.
03:31He was that bloody Sunday.
03:34Your friend's Imperial guard shot him.
03:38Right here.
03:44He was just an old man.
03:47I wish I'd smashed the eggs when I'd had the chance.
03:53So how had it all gone so horribly wrong for Fabergé
03:57and the aristocracy that adored him?
04:00And just what happened to the Fabergé eggs?
04:03The story begins in the same city where it ended.
04:07St. Petersburg.
04:09The Fabergé family originally came out from France.
04:12They were refugees from the repeal of the Edict of Nantes.
04:16That's to say they were Huguenots,
04:18Protestants being persecuted by Louis XIV.
04:20And they fled eastwards from there.
04:22Carl Fabergé, known sometimes as Peter Carl because he was christened that,
04:27born in 1846, schooled in a German school in St. Petersburg.
04:29His father owned a small jewelry shop. It was a small jewelry shop but in a smart area.
04:40His father clearly had an eye for Carl becoming something greater than just the jeweler he had been.
04:46Fabergé had such extraordinary talent and his workshop was so extraordinary.
04:52The other thing is that he could be considered a foreign citizen.
04:55But being foreign in St. Petersburg was not at all unusual.
05:00It was a very, very cosmopolitan city.
05:03He very much planned his education to give him an exposure to Western art,
05:06to some of the great jewelry treasures around Europe.
05:09The training that he received when he was abroad with his family,
05:13studying the collections of museums in Paris and London,
05:17returned to Russia and at the tender age of 26 takes over his father's firm.
05:21In Russia, at the end of the 19th century though, one had to get the attention of the Tsar to really make a name for yourself.
05:29And that was especially the case at the time of the autocratic Alexander III.
05:34Alexander III was so horrified by his own father, who was generally a liberal and a progressive,
05:39he decided to reverse every reform.
05:43On the other hand, there was quite a lot to be said for Alexander III.
05:47He was almost the only Russian leader never to declare war on another country.
05:51He was also an extremely brave and powerful man.
05:54Perhaps his major mistake was not preparing his son, Nicholas II, to rule.
05:59Karl Fabergé implemented a plan that would eventually catch the eye of this imperious Tsar.
06:07He started working on restoring ancient Scythian jewelry,
06:11which had recently been excavated from the Black Sea.
06:14He works on a volunteer basis at the Armitage,
06:18appraising and repairing objects without invoicing the court.
06:23And it all really paid off for him in 1882.
06:28There was an exhibition of Russian art, which Fabergé exhibited,
06:32and what he was exhibiting was pieces derived from those Scythian artefacts,
06:38which appealed hugely to the Russian public,
06:41because they gave the impression that Russia had this art-rich prehistory
06:46to compete with anything in the West.
06:48That exhibition was visited by the Russian royal family,
06:51and the Tsarina, Marie Fedorovna, bought the Tsar a pair of cufflinks
06:57from the Fabergé stand, cufflinks with a cicada motif.
07:02So that was the first time he sold something to the Russian royal family.
07:07This brings him favour, because in 1885 he's awarded the imperial warrant.
07:12Having been awarded the coveted imperial warrant,
07:15Karl Fabergé starts work on what would be the beginning of a long line of Easter gifts.
07:21The first hen egg.
07:23The first imperial egg was presented in 1885 by the Tsar, Alexander III, to his wife, Marie Fedorovna.
07:31It's a deceptively simple egg, and I think it's a great microcosm of what Fabergé does so well.
07:36It's white enamel on the outside, it's a gold yolk on the inside represented, a chicken.
07:43You open it up, inside it you find a golden yolk.
07:46You can open up the yolk, and inside that you find a golden hen.
07:50Inside was an imperial crown and a pendant.
07:53So it was like a matryoshka, you know, one of these Russian dolls.
07:56He was probably wanting something to delight her, something to amuse her.
07:58What better way to celebrate 20 years of marriage, an Easter in one, and led to a commission, an ongoing rolling commission that lasted 33 years.
08:09Clearly that first egg worked, and each year the emperor would give the empress an Easter egg from Fabergé.
08:15Famously, Fabergé started to get total autonomy in the designs, and with only three commands, that each gift should be egg-shaped, that each one should be different from any predecessor, and that each one should contain something of a surprise, something that would delight the empress.
08:33Carl Fabergé would quickly become a favorite of the Russian royal family.
08:39But neither they, nor he, saw the huge changes which were coming to the Russian Empire, that would leave both Fabergé and his incredible imperial eggs in great peril.
08:50Towards the end of the 19th century, master jeweller Karl Fabergé had become a firm favorite of the Russian Tsar, Alexander III, and his wife, the Tsarina, Marie Fyodorovna.
09:11His one-of-a-kind imperial eggs had become a highlight of the Easter celebration.
09:20In 1890, he presented the exquisite Danish palaces egg, complete with the surprise of folding miniatures.
09:30This was followed by the memory of Azov egg, which commemorated a voyage taken by the future Tsar Nicholas II on the armored Russian cruiser, the Azov, where he narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Japan.
09:44The diamond trellis egg, made from pale jadeite, was presented in 1892, and was followed by the Caucasus egg of translucent ruby enamel in 1893.
10:00The Renaissance egg of 1894 would prove to be the last presented by Tsar Alexander III to his wife, Marie.
10:10That same year, the Tsar suddenly fell ill with an incurable kidney disease, and he died at the age of only 49.
10:19The sudden death of the Tsar left his son, the terribly unprepared Nicholas II, to take the throne.
10:30And things got off to a dreadful start when, at a celebration of his coronation at Kadinka Fields near Moscow, a stampede killed over 1,300 people.
10:38The public at large was not impressed with Nicholas' response to the tragedy.
10:47He was doomed after the Kadinka Fields catastrophe.
10:51He wasn't strong like his father.
10:53He wasn't expecting to be Tsar.
10:56He was only in his twenties.
10:58He had kept an iron grasp on the people.
11:02And then Nicholas comes along and he's a bit more diffident.
11:06To begin your coronation with a mass death of the population is bad.
11:11And then worse still, he should go to a ball at the French embassy on the same day of this disaster.
11:17So that, in fact, did his prestige an enormous damage, which he never recovered.
11:23His strength and his weakness was that he was slightly normal and he rather liked normal life.
11:29He liked chopping wood, being with his family and smoking, which he did a lot of the time.
11:38Fortunately for Fabergé though, Nicholas continued the tradition of imperial Easter eggs.
11:43And in fact, two were now requested each year.
11:46One for Nicholas' mother, the now dowager empress, and one for the new Tsarina, Alexandra, who unfortunately was just as unpopular as the Tsar.
11:56Tsarina Alexandra came from the small German court of Darmstadt.
12:03And she was known as the German one.
12:06That was a problem for her to get over to start with.
12:09Some Russian empresses have overcome this, but she was extremely tactless.
12:15She was convinced that Russia should be an absolute monarchy.
12:18And she pushed her husband and she had extremely bad judgment.
12:22She didn't enjoy balls and dances.
12:25She thought that the Russian aristocracy were very decadent.
12:29Meanwhile, the dowager had been very fun-loving.
12:32It was very popular.
12:33The Tsarina had a hard act to follow and she didn't really manage.
12:38The first pair of eggs given was in 1895, when Tsarina Alexandra received the rosebud egg and the dowager received the blue serpent clock egg.
12:49This egg would eventually end up in Monaco, where it became a treasured possession of Princess Grace.
12:55Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip take the royal drive along the superb course.
13:00Princess Grace and Prince Regnier are guests.
13:03Three other eggs also ended up in royal possession, becoming the property of Queen Elizabeth II.
13:09The colonnade egg, the basket of flowers egg, and the stunning mosaic egg.
13:15It seems that Fabergé has always been a favourite of royalty right from the days of his very first royal client, the Dowager Empress, Marie Fyodorovna.
13:25Christ is risen.
13:27He is risen indeed.
13:29You look well, Master Jeweller.
13:32I persevere, Your Majesty.
13:35Yes.
13:36You are a wonderful reminder to the court that our generation is not past quite yet.
13:42We persevere indeed.
13:45I think Fabergé had an intimate relationship with virtually every member of the imperial family.
13:49Their relationships and their loves, their passions, their lusts and so on, were expressed through the exchanges of these gifts.
13:56So all of the emotions which, you know, are treasured in them as these historical figures coalesced into these Fabergé objects.
14:04On behalf of His Imperial Majesty, it is the great honour of the Carl Fabergé Company to present this year's Easter gift.
14:13Maria Fyodorovna was, unlike Nicholas II's wife, she had extraordinary charm.
14:19Once she was the Dowager Empress, she was the most respected member of the royal family.
14:25The Dowager was generally more charming and outgoing than the Tsarina, and she had established a good relationship with Fabergé.
14:34He had obviously prepared the surprises very well. She'd always liked them.
14:39Marie Fyodorovna, she was essentially the same age as him. She was his original client. She received those original eggs.
14:50And there are certainly letters from her, for example, to her sister, who was our own Queen Alexandra here in the UK,
14:56in which she said, Fabergé bought the most wonderful egg. I told him you were a genius. Clearly she liked him.
15:01My hopeful majesty is pleased. My dear, dear Fabergé, you truly are an unparalleled genius.
15:13Fabergé's connection with the Imperial family was the ultimate cachet, and his workshop was soon producing an array of items for other European aristocratic families.
15:23He even opened up an international store in London.
15:26That idea of a feudal society, if it was the fascination of the court, it quickly became the fascination of every level of society.
15:34The aristocracy, the traders, the bankers, the entrepreneurs, they would all want to participate in that royal fascination.
15:42And it wasn't just in Russia. In England, exactly the same thing happened.
15:46Fashion such as cigarette smoking came to the fore. Fabergé responded very quickly to this with cigarette cases.
15:54When you open this, you have not only the case itself and the characteristic thumbpiece here,
16:03it opens to reveal a signature and a date. So this is when a cigarette case is not only a cigarette case,
16:10but it's a case that's been purchased by a grand duchess as a gift.
16:16Fabergé is a Russian company and they were made in Russia and they are quintessentially Russian.
16:21It does have a distinct English flavour.
16:24And I think there is perhaps more Fabergé within a mile radius of where we're stood now
16:29than there is in the entirety of Russia and America put together.
16:32Essentially, the London shop was started on the back of commissions or requests for objects
16:38from the British royal family. And the British royal family had learnt to love Fabergé
16:43because of the relationship between Marie Federovna and Alexandra.
16:48Edward VII and then Queen Alexandra, the sister of Marie Federovna,
16:52they were also fascinated by Fabergé. And as a consequence, English society became fascinated by Fabergé.
16:58There's a famous story of, I think he was by then Edward VII being given a present by a friend,
17:06saying, actually, I don't particularly want this. If you want to buy me something,
17:10go down to Fabergé's shop and look at what he's got.
17:13Although the 50 imperial eggs are undoubtedly the most desired today,
17:17Fabergé did make other Easter eggs for paying customers, including the wealthy Kelch family.
17:22If you were a Russian lady of some stature, you would have chains of miniature Fabergé eggs
17:28and then there were eggs in between that were given the size of hen's eggs
17:32and there were various types which are all marvellous and they're all wonderful.
17:36The problem with making stuff for the Russian royal family was the bureaucracy he had to deal with.
17:41He did find it more congenial making objects for the newly emerging middle classes,
17:48or very rich middle classes, I should say.
17:51Two very prominent European families who commissioned works from Fabergé
17:55were the Rothschilds and the Nobels, for whom the Nobel ice egg was made.
18:00They were happy to spend what it required, happy to give him carte blanche
18:04and to take what he made for them, and he made some fabulous objects for them.
18:08Fabergé made two eggs every year during Nicholas II's reign,
18:12with the exceptions of 1904 and 1905, when no eggs were presented.
18:17During this period, Russia suffered a disastrous defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.
18:231905 was an especially bad year, with the Bloody Sunday Massacre being carried out in St. Petersburg,
18:30and the eventually unsuccessful 1905 revolution.
18:34Work on the eggs resumed in 1906 with the Swan egg, with its automaton miniature.
18:40Carl Fabergé had brought his son Agathon into the company, which now had over 500 employees.
18:47Neffrite exterior, watercolour miniatures of the children.
19:00Father?
19:04You can do better.
19:05When World War I broke out in 1914, Russia was soon dragged in,
19:14and Tsar Nicholas II left the Imperial Court to take charge of the armed forces.
19:20In response, Carl Fabergé made what would turn out to be his last Easter gift,
19:25the steel military egg.
19:27Presented to the Tsarina Alexandra, it contained a surprise of her husband and son commanding the Russian army.
19:34But Nicholas II was never suited to being a military leader,
19:40and Russia was grossly unprepared for the war effort.
19:44Once the Germans came to the help of the Austro-Hungarians,
19:48and pushed the Russian army back,
19:50and the soldiers found they had to go into battle with no boots, no rifle,
19:55and were told to take it off the first corpse they found,
19:58then the whole thing fell apart.
20:00Once housewives came out of the houses banging saucepans because there was no bread,
20:05then the Tsar had to go.
20:07The Imperial family were offered an exile in England,
20:11but all the children were ill.
20:14They all had measles.
20:17And there was also the thought that the situation wasn't as grave as people were making out.
20:24So they delayed their departure.
20:27George V, who was a cousin of the Tsar, took away his offer.
20:31It was considered safer to take them to Siberia.
20:35However, the revolutionary Bolshevik forces led by Lenin managed to capture the Tsar,
20:44the Tsarina, and their children,
20:46and take them to the city of Ekaterinburg, where they came to a grisly end.
20:51Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of your relatives' continuing attacks on Soviet Russia,
20:57the Ural Executive Committee has ordered that you are to be executed.
21:06The reason that they were executed was really because where they were kept in the Urals,
21:12the white army was approaching.
21:14And the Reds feared, perhaps justifiably, if the whites captured them again,
21:19they would have something to rally the country around once you got the Tsar back.
21:23And I think the panicky execution was not due entirely to sheer brutality,
21:30but just to deny the opposition in the Civil War an important symbolic figure.
21:36There's a certain amount of obfuscation about it.
21:39I think because perhaps Lenin, at various points, thought it wouldn't be good
21:44for him to be named as the killer of the whole family.
21:48So there's also a dispute over who gave orders for the Tsar and Tsarina to be killed,
21:53and who gave orders for the whole family to be killed.
21:56Lenin definitely sanctioned it.
21:58I mean, the brutality of the revolution, the Civil War, was so horrific
22:02that the deaths of the Tsars fit in with the deaths of millions of others
22:06who were shot, tortured, drowned, and so on.
22:11The murder of the Russian royal family meant that Carl Fabergé's life
22:15was hanging in the balance, and his amazing collection of works
22:18was in danger of being lost forever.
22:21Which makes the recent rediscovery of one of his imperial eggs
22:25all the more miraculous.
22:36In July 1918, the Russian royal family was executed,
22:40and all their possessions seized by the new Soviet state.
22:44Carl Fabergé, very much a part of the now extinct Imperial Russia,
22:53was in danger of meeting a similar end.
22:56I saw them once.
23:00The eggs.
23:03I was a boy.
23:06My grandfather took me to your exhibition.
23:09I had pestered him about it for weeks.
23:17Did you have a favourite?
23:20In the early 1900s, he built a purpose-built headquarters in St. Petersburg
23:24with the shop on the ground floor.
23:26Floors above that included essentially workshops
23:29where a lot of the jewellery happened,
23:32although a lot of the other more specialist work
23:34would happen in other workshops outside.
23:36And then on floors above that, the design studio.
23:39One ruble, ten kopecks it cost to get in.
23:47You wouldn't even bend down in the street to pick that up, would you?
23:51One ruble.
23:55I didn't know that was more than he made in a week.
24:02He was that bloody Sunday.
24:04It's estimated that the Fabergé enterprise,
24:06well, he had workshops in St. Petersburg and in Moscow.
24:09Moscow was where they made silver.
24:11He had shops in those two places.
24:14Also Odessa, which was a popular tourist destination.
24:17And London, which dealt with most of his international business.
24:21And total employees either working for or indirectly for Fabergé,
24:25probably about 1,500 at his height.
24:27Your friend's imperial guard shot him.
24:31Right here.
24:38He was just an old man.
24:43I wish I'd smashed the eggs when I'd had the chance.
24:45They had a first stage of revolution, a parliamentary government.
24:49But it couldn't end the war.
24:51And it couldn't continue the war.
24:53The officers wouldn't stop fighting.
24:55The soldiers wouldn't go and fight.
24:57And finally, a small group of highly organized men, the Bolsheviks,
25:02understood how to make a revolution.
25:04I wish many things were different.
25:12Comrade Lenin back in exile, you mean.
25:16Bloody Nicholas in his palace.
25:19They understood you don't have to have large numbers.
25:21You just take the railway junction and the telephone exchange.
25:25Once you hold those two, everyone else is paralyzed.
25:28So you could say it was Lenin's and Trotsky's highly intelligent methods
25:36for a small group to take over a large country
25:39that finished that stage of the revolution.
25:44You little looters, war profiteers, parasites!
25:48Do it fat while the working man dies!
25:58But you don't make the world anymore.
26:17Time to go, citizen.
26:21Famously, the Bolsheviks arrived at Fabergé's business to take it over.
26:25He said, just give me a minute to fetch my hat and coat.
26:28And essentially slipped out the back.
26:31Soon afterwards, he was smuggled out of St. Petersburg.
26:37He ended up in Switzerland.
26:40But he was clearly broken by the events of the revolution.
26:43He was not placed under arrest, nor was he dragged to Ekaterinburg
26:46and shot any of his family members.
26:48So his destiny was very different.
26:51His holdings were nationalized and eventually found his way to Lausanne,
26:57having traveled with his clothes and apparently a collection of wine,
27:01and died in Lausanne in 1920.
27:05Fabergé wasn't the only one who escaped, though.
27:09The dowager empress also managed to flee the revolution,
27:12despite having been a Tsarina herself.
27:14She, along with other members of her family,
27:17were taken to safety aboard the British battleship HMS Marlborough.
27:22George V felt very guilty when he heard, obviously, this terrible tragedy.
27:28He made great efforts to get the dowager out
27:31and the Tsar's sister, Ksenia, and all Ksenia's children.
27:36The local Reds never got round to executing members of the royal family.
27:41They were too much of a hurry defending themselves.
27:44And so she managed to get out on a British battleship.
27:47On the Marlborough, Prince Felix Yusupov, who murdered Rasputin,
27:51had two Rembrandts, and he was seen on deck with them rolled up under his arm.
27:56There was the Fabergé egg, the cross of St. George, down in the hold.
28:00And the Yusupovs also had other treasures.
28:0420 million pounds worth of jewels and treasures on board.
28:09So quite an extraordinary amount.
28:12The cross of St. George egg was the last Fabergé egg presented to the dowager empress.
28:17By taking it with her, it became the only imperial Easter egg
28:21known to have left Russia with its owner.
28:24Carl Fabergé may have escaped to Switzerland,
28:26but his son Agathon, who'd become a key part of the Fabergé company,
28:30was not so lucky and remained in the now Soviet Russia.
28:34I think a lot of the enterprise and dealing within Fabergé's world was conducted by Agathon.
28:41And I think he did exactly the same after the revolution as he had done before.
28:45And he was a conduit himself for the movement of objects out of Russia to the west.
28:49And in fact, in Wortsky's ledgers, there are references to us buying objects from Fabergé.
28:57And the Fabergé was Agathon Fabergé.
28:59Agathon Fabergé managed to escape Soviet Russia himself in 1927,
29:04but he had left behind one of the unfinished eggs due to be given to the Romanovs in 1917.
29:08It was found essentially in the Furzman Mineralogical Museum in Moscow.
29:15They thought it was a lampstand.
29:17It is actually an egg-shaped bit of polished blue glass on a funny sort of cloud-shaped bit of other glass.
29:25They now know, in fact, that that was going to be the egg for Alexandra Fedorovna.
29:29The story of the blue Zarevich constellation egg reveals the precarious times that faced the imperial treasures after the Russian Revolution.
29:39Both Lenin and Stalin authorised the sale of many of Russia's greatest works of art to fund the Soviet programmes.
29:47The revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power.
29:51Even if there hadn't been economic collapse as well, it would have changed everything.
29:56Economic collapse as well just made it all even worse.
29:59There was so much Russian art and you could argue that, in fact, Russia had plundered all Europe in the 18th century.
30:05Catherine the Great got an enormous amount of stuff from impoverished English collectors and aristocrats.
30:12One of Lenin's famous commands was loot the looters.
30:15That is to say, all these people have been living the life of Reilly for the last 50, 100, 300 years.
30:23It is now our turn to loot them.
30:25And despite the looting, the smashing, the rotting away, there's still the Hermitage Gallery in St. Petersburg can only display a tiny fraction of what it has.
30:36Countless works of art were sold abroad, including the Fabergé eggs, and their buyers were a very mysterious bunch.
30:43They included Emmanuel Snowman of Watsky and Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum.
30:50Armand Hammer is a fascinating character and he was almost the Joseph Devine of his day.
30:54Multi-millionaire capitalist who alleges that he is in fact a communist and then goes over and makes big deals with Lenin.
31:05He was not a communist. He was a capitalist through and through.
31:07He organised trunk shows through department stores across America and catered to the way that women bought things and made Fabergé pieces accessible to the American public.
31:20Ultimately, he became the agent for the sale of Russian works of art primarily, almost solely to America.
31:30And so he was the conduit from Russia to America, whilst Emmanuel Snowman was a conduit from Russia to Western Europe.
31:36A king's ransom in art jewels. Gems from the collection of the late Tsar of Russia on exhibition.
31:43Treasure worth many millions, procured from the Soviet government after the revolution.
31:47Armand Hammer and Emmanuel Snowman were two of the major figures who had facilitated the movement of Fabergé eggs to the west.
31:55But one man who wanted to gather them for himself was Malcolm Forbes of Forbes magazine.
32:01He went on a spending spree.
32:03Malcolm Forbes was a relative late-come and Forbes was possessed by a collecting mania.
32:09He was an obsessive collector, I suppose.
32:11The great thing about Fabergé eggs is there are only, what, 50 imperial ones and another 16.
32:18So you could actually get the lot.
32:21It was one of those things where you could find you had a complete stamp collection.
32:25In a span of two decades, Malcolm Forbes managed to get his hands on nine imperial Fabergé eggs in total.
32:33His ambition was always to have more Easter eggs than the Kremlin.
32:37He never quite got there, but he got very close.
32:40While most of the imperial Fabergé eggs were sold abroad for foreign currency, ten did remain in the Kremlin armory and have never left the country.
32:49And one of the great sort of stories and unknowns of these eggs is that we know exactly where they were in Soviet times.
32:56We know where they were in imperial times.
32:58And we really know where they were once they emerged in the west.
33:01The skullduggery and the mischief of those original and first transactions we don't know.
33:08And so I feel as though there are wonderfully sort of untold stories there involving these sort of ravenous dealers and sort of mischievous individuals.
33:16Malcolm Forbes' determination to collect as many Fabergé eggs as he could helped shoot up the price of these one-of-a-kind treasures.
33:25When the winter egg went on sale in 2002, it was bought by a Qatari bidder for $8.7 million.
33:32All done at $8,700,000.
33:36Maria, your bidder at $8,700,000.
33:39My favourite egg is one that was given to Marie Fedorovna in 1913.
33:46And that's one of the most striking things about it, is here we are, almost 30 years after that first egg, and you're still getting wonderful creativity.
33:53It looks like you're looking through a winter fog as you look through the egg.
33:55It's sitting on more carved rock crystal, which is polished so much that it looks like melting ice.
34:02And then within the egg, so you can see it through a winter fog, or open the egg and lift it out, is a little basket of enameled flowers of spring anemies.
34:11So you've got a wonderful symbolism there of spring seen through winter.
34:15In 2004, though, Malcolm Forbes' collection of Fabergé eggs would make their way back home to St. Petersburg,
34:22when they were purchased by the Russian oligarch, Victor Vexelberg.
34:27Vexelberg, I think, spent something like $100 million, getting quite a large number of eggs back.
34:33They've gone back to the Fabergé Museum in St. Petersburg, which actually is a fabulous destination for them.
34:40Whatever the mechanism of why they got there, where they have ended up, is the perfect home for them.
34:45For the longest time, 42 imperial Fabergé eggs were known to have survived the Russian Revolution,
34:52with just eight remaining lost.
34:55But then, out of the blue, an American man arrived at Wartzki in London,
35:00with evidence that one of those eggs had been found.
35:03Wartzki in London is forever entwined with the history of Fabergé.
35:16So it's the only place you would go if you thought you'd found a missing imperial Fabergé egg.
35:21And that's exactly what an American individual recently did.
35:24In walked a gentleman, and he was the most unassuming, unprepossessing individual.
35:31He was wearing a plaid American shirt, the quintessential red plaid American shirt, jeans.
35:36He asked me by name, but when I came up, he couldn't actually speak to me.
35:40His mouth was dry with fear. There was a sort of, like, a sort of inability to communicate.
35:46Just a couple of years before, a pair of intrepid researchers looked through a 1964 catalogue
35:53of the auctioneers Parker-Bernet, now a part of Sotheby's.
35:57Within it, they discovered an image of the missing third imperial Fabergé egg,
36:02which had been sold with everyone unaware of its true origin.
36:05The only other known image of this egg is from the 1902 Von Dervis Mansion exhibition,
36:12where many of the Fabergé eggs had been displayed.
36:15But this new discovery proved that the egg had made it to the west,
36:19and there was now a far clearer photograph of it.
36:24Kieran McCarthy of Wortsky was part of an article published by the Daily Telegraph
36:29on this catalogue discovery, which gave some hope that the egg may turn up someday.
36:33Now that it was proved to have survived the Russian Revolution.
36:37But little did he know how quickly that article would lead him to the egg itself.
36:42I went out to America pretty much as quickly as my feet and the wings would carry me afterwards.
36:49We travelled a long way to a very remote part, and I walked into the kitchen of this house,
36:55which is a million miles from Imperial St. Petersburg, and sat on a kitchen counter.
37:00There was a cupcake, and next to it, the missing Easter egg.
37:06A Google search had proved key in bringing owner and expert together.
37:12He had no idea whatsoever that it was Fabergé.
37:16He had no concept that this was a missing Imperial egg.
37:18And so he typed into Google, of all things, he typed Vacheron Constantin and egg.
37:24What came up was all of the art historical research which I and Wortsky had been involved in surrounding this egg.
37:31And so, although the miracle of him walking through our door one day was a miracle,
37:35the actual link and the reason why he walked through our door was that research.
37:41It proves that these eggs are out there to find.
37:43You know, there were 50 eggs. Some of them were destroyed or melted down or disappeared.
37:49And we had thought that eight were missing until recently that was the case.
37:54And then this third egg appeared.
37:56Well, the egg displays every wonder of Fabergé's work.
38:02The first is, it's a very simple construction.
38:04It's a reeded gold egg.
38:06But the simplicity belies how difficult it is to make.
38:10Each one of these reeds is formed by hand by a craftsman at a work bench.
38:15They taper at the same rate to an exact point, both at the bottom and at the top.
38:20And when you press the diamond at the front, it opens to reveal the watch by Vacher and Constantin.
38:29And this scrolling around the bezel of the aperture where it's there is found on many of them.
38:36It's the identical engravings on the cradle with Garland's egg.
38:39And so you begin to see these little sort of hints of what Fabergé has done before
38:44and of how Fabergé's craftsmen worked.
38:46And another aspect is when you flip the watch up, it sits,
38:51which is a beautiful little piece of design which actually allows it to work
38:55as not just an Easter egg, but as a clock.
38:58And where you really see the absolute tour de force of goldsmithing
39:02is not so much in the simple egg, but in the far more elaborate stand.
39:07Four coloured gold roses, and roses are an emblem of love.
39:11And so the Tsar and the Tsarina, when they saw this, would know that it was an expression of love.
39:16And then the lion paw feet, they're beautifully finished on top,
39:21and they are slightly stylised, but very sort of endearing lion's paws.
39:26But when you turn it over and look at the base,
39:30the pads and the underside of the feet are as beautifully represented.
39:34And of course, the Tsarina would never have seen that, because it would have sat like that.
39:39This is one of the most sophisticated pieces of goldsmithing,
39:43from Fabergé's or anybody else's hands, that has ever been created.
39:47And it would have been a gift appropriate for a Tsar.
39:49But what of the seven imperial Fabergé eggs that are still missing?
39:55Well, one of them is called the Cherub with Chariot egg.
39:59And it could be seen in the same photograph from the 1902 von Dervis exhibition
40:03that featured the third imperial egg.
40:06Sitting sneakily behind the Caucasus egg, you can see the wheel of the Cherub with Chariot egg,
40:11and can catch a glimpse of it in the reflection of the glass casing.
40:18This artist's interpretation shows what the egg could look like
40:22if you happen to notice another £20 million treasure at an antique store.
40:27But this isn't the only Fabergé egg of which we have but a faint glimpse.
40:31The fifth egg in the series is known as the nécessaire egg,
40:35and it featured at a 1949 exhibition of Fabergé eggs in London.
40:39London, and a Regent Street jeweller has become the setting for an exhibition
40:44of the work of Karl Fabergé, that great craftsman of Tsarist Russia.
40:48His son, Eugène Fabergé, holds one of the jewel-studded enamel and gold Easter eggs
40:53made for the last empress as a gift from the Tsar.
40:56Kieran McCarthy, who was instrumental in finding the third Fabergé egg,
41:01has also brought us closer to uncovering this one
41:04when he found an image of it in the back of a photograph taken at the exhibition.
41:09That's one of the most frustrating sort of events in my life.
41:12Walski is an Edwardian company, and our ledgers are arranged
41:16that on the left-hand side it shows what the object is.
41:19And I looked across where we have the name of the buyer,
41:22the address of the buyer, and how much they paid.
41:24So I thought, if Mr. Bloggs lives at Four Blogs Square,
41:27I can go knock on Four Blogs Square and find the egg within.
41:29But I look across and it said a stranger.
41:33And Walski's discretion, as it is with this egg,
41:36we cannot reveal who bought or sold this egg.
41:39And there is no way of telling where it went.
41:41The exquisite work of a man who was court jeweler and goldsmith to Russia's royal house
41:47still mirrors the splendour of an age that is no more.
41:50Although the Necessaire egg featured at this exhibition,
41:53it was not known at the time to be the fifth imperial Easter egg.
41:56The Necessaire egg was never recognised as an imperial Fabergé egg,
41:59but importantly, it was recognised as a Fabergé egg.
42:03So this egg here was never known to be Fabergé.
42:07And so because of that, it was never likely to be saved because it was Fabergé.
42:12And as a result, this danced on the precipice of the melting pot over and over again.
42:17It was sold to almost certainly an English customer.
42:21And it was only in 1952, so it is likely to have survived.
42:24And that one, I feel in my instinct, has survived.
42:29Of the five eggs where we've got no trace of them coming to the West,
42:33it's possible that they'll emerge one day.
42:36It's equally possible that they were destroyed in the whole chaos around the revolution.
42:40Despite the slim chances of discovery,
42:43there are photos of two of these five most elusive Fabergé eggs.
42:48The 1909 Alexander III commemorative egg
42:51and the 1903 Royal Danish egg.
42:55Oddly, we also have the surprise of the 1897 Mauve egg,
43:00but not the egg itself.
43:02The missing Royal Danish egg is the intriguing one though,
43:06as it was presented to the Dowager Empress
43:08whilst she was away at her original home of Copenhagen in 1903.
43:12It's not known for sure if she ever brought the egg back to Russia,
43:16so it may be the case that something is amiss in the state of Denmark.
43:20You just never know, and that's partly the mystery of them,
43:25and I think that's why this one, this particular egg is so significant,
43:29because it is one of the missing ones.
43:30Well, it seems possible that it might be there.
43:32She wasn't very keen to pass anything on when she was alive,
43:36and she used to say, you can have my treasure when I'm dead.
43:40So, yeah, it could be, yes.
43:42It could be, yes.
43:43When you know the history, it becomes rather blasé,
43:47you know, I know that one, I've seen it there,
43:48it was exhibited there and it went there and they paid so much
43:51and they did this.
43:52It's the ones you don't know about that actually excite the mind
43:55and the fascination.
43:57All seven of the missing eggs are ones that were presented
44:00to the Dowager Empress, Marie Fyodorovna.
44:03It's known that she escaped Russia on the HMS Marlborough
44:06with the Cross of St George egg on board.
44:09The Dowager took the egg with her, presumably to England.
44:13I think then Xenia, her daughter, then Vasily, her youngest son,
44:20ended up with it and then he sold it.
44:23But there's no reason why this should have been the only egg
44:25she took with her.
44:27It's possible she packed up the Empire Nephrite egg and Mauve egg
44:31or any other of the missing ones, such as the second hen egg
44:34with sapphire pendant.
44:35These are the only three eggs left, of which we have no images.
44:39But that doesn't mean they're not out there.
44:42It's like James Dean. It's like, you know, if Fabergé had carried on
44:45and we were now on the 1,042nd Fabergé egg,
44:48I think they would not have the same appeal.
44:51But the fact that it's finite, the glory of Fabergé is that it is no more.
44:55The reason we've all heard of Fabergé today is because of the eggs.
44:58These great, fabulous objects that he started to make
45:00for the Russian royal family.
45:02They are just so over the top, so wonderful, so inspired in their creativity as well.
45:07They're just wonderful objects for combining history and craftsmanship.
45:13The extraordinary about Fabergé is the very, very expensive materials used, unique jewels.
45:19The materials themselves are wealth beyond imagination.
45:21Then the extraordinary craftsmanship, the miniaturization of the work.
45:26It's an oriental type of work.
45:28It's very, very Iranian, Indian in its use of jewellery, it's an intricacy.
45:33Fabergé eggs sort of encapsulate the romance of the story.
45:38So much care gone into them.
45:40They're a product of the social, cultural, financial, political circumstances of that moment.
45:48And it's that collision of great craftsmanship and uncompromising patronage
45:52that gives rise to this fascination with Fabergé.
45:54Fabergé.
45:55Fabergé.
45:57Fabergé
46:19Fabergé