Scrap Metal Dealer Buys Fabergé Imperial Egg at Midwestern Antiques Stall

The latest astonishing story of lucky finds amidst the bric-a-brac begins in the 1880s, when jeweler Carl Fabergé made the first of 50 eggs for the Russian imperial family. The first was given by Tsar Alexander III to his wife on Easter 1885. People who love this sort of royal memorabilia have of course spent much time trying to track them all down, but eight have remained stubbornly lost. One of the missing eggs was the third, made in 1887:

The Third Egg was photographed at the 1902 exhibition of Tsarina Alexandra’s and Dowager Empress Maria’s Fabergé treasures at the Von Dervis mansion in St. Petersburg, but it wasn’t until 2011 that it was identified in the Imperial Egg display vitrine thanks to the discovery of a more recent picture from 1964. It turns out that sometime after it was inventoried by Soviet curators in 1922, the Third Egg traveled west. In March of 1964 it was lot 259 in a Parke Bernet auction in New York, but it was not identified as an Imperial Egg. It wasn’t even identified as a Fabergé. . . .

The disinherited Imperial Egg was purchased at that auction by a Southern lady for $2450. After her death in the early 2000s, her estate was sold and the egg, still unrecognized, made its way to a midwestern antiques stall where it was spotted by a scrap metal dealer. He planned to quickly resell it to be melted down for its gold value, but all of the prospective buyers who tested it thought he had overpaid. Blessedly stubborn, he refused to sell it at a loss and so for years he just kept the egg at home.

Interesting that Fabergé was using low purity gold; was that to make the eggs harder and more durable, or was he cheating the Tsar and pocketing the money? Eventually the metals dealer, disappointed in his attempts to recoup his investment by melting down the egg, started to google around and realized that he might have something valuable. He flew to London -- his first trip out of the U.S. -- where specialists from Wartski identified the egg and arranged for its sale to an undisclosed buyer for an undisclosed sum. The buyer was probably a Russian oligarch, and the sum surely in the tens of millions.

History Blog has the whole story.