Rolls-Royce has just released a series of never-before-seen images of the Spirit of Ecstasy Fabergé Egg it created for a collector of Rolls-Royce and House of Fabergé.
The history behind Fabergé Eggs is quite interesting. The story goes that in 1885, Emperor Alexander III of Russia commissioned celebrated Saint Petersburg jeweler House of Fabergé to create a special jeweled egg he could give his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna, as an Easter gift. The egg was crafted from gold with an opaque white enameled shell that could be open to reveal a yellow-gold yolk.
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Found inside was a special golden hen that concealed a small diamond replica of the Imperial crown, featuring a ruby pendant. In the years after the original Fabergé Egg was created, giving them out as gifts during Easter became a tradition for Russia’s ruling dynasty. It is claimed that a total of 69 Fabergé eggs were manufactured with just 57 thought to have survived to the present day. They are extraordinarily valuable and in 2014, the Third Imperial Fabergé Egg sold for $33 million at an auction.
In 2018, a patron of both Rolls-Royce and House of Fabergé commissioned a new Imperial Egg to be created. The finished egg stands at 160 mm high and weighs 400 grams and is only the second object to be commissioned in House of Fabergé’s ‘Imperial Class’ of object d’art since the fall of the Romanovs in 1917.
The egg rests on a hand-engraved and engine-turned purple enamel guilloche base made from 18-carat white gold. There are then arms of rose gold that form the shape of the egg which can be slowly opened up by a discreet lever at the base of the stand, revealing a Spirit of Ecstasy figurine hand-sculpted in frosted rock crystal. The rose gold vanes feature nearly 10 carats of round white diamonds and natural amethyst weighing over 390 carats.