If you're not into eggs all that much, this museum also has more than 4,000 works of decorative applied and fine arts. However - hey - I didn't think I was "into" eggs either, but the more I read about them, the more intriguing they sound.
I have a tour of The Faberge Museum booked, and it has a group of nine imperial easter eggs created for the last two Russian Tsars; the Emperors Alexander III and Nicolas II. Interested? How about if I told you these nine eggs were bought quite a few years ago for $100 million American dollars. Yikes. Now I'm afraid to even look!
Every year Tsar Alexander III gave his wife a new and unique egg - each containing some kind of "surprise" within it.
Materials: Gold, green-gold, translucent rose pink, and green enamel, diamonds, rubies, pearls, rock crystal, watercolor on ivory
This gold, art-nouveau style egg is enameled translucent rose on a guilloche field and supported on four dull green-gold cabriolet legs, composed of overlapping leaves veined in rose-cut diamonds. The egg is surmounted by a rose-cut diamond and cabochon ruby Imperial crown set, with two bows and quartered by four lines of rose-cut diamonds and decorated with lilies of the valley in pearls and rose-cut diamonds. The stalks are lightly engraved green gold, and the leaves are enameled translucent green on gold.
The surprise consists of three oval miniatures of Nicholas II in military uniform and the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana, his first two children. It rises from the top of the egg by means of a geared mechanism and spreads into a fan when a gold-mounted pearl button at the side is turned. A turn in the opposite direction automatically folds and returns the miniatures back to the interior of the egg. The Julian date, April 5, 1898, is engraved on the reverse of the miniatures. Johannes Zehngraf painted the miniatures on ivory; the egg retains its original fitted velvet case.
A lover of flowers, Alexandra Fedorovna regularly had trainloads of blooms brought to St. Petersburg from the Crimea to adorn the Alexander Palace. Lilies of the valley were among the tsarina’s favorite flowers, as were pearls her favorite jewels.
http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/lillies.html
