The last Imperial Fabergé Eater egg made for Tsar Nicholas II to give to his wife Alexandra Feodorovna was the Constellation egg. It is one of Fabergé’s most interesting eggs not least because it was never finished and its component parts were recently discovered languishing in the Fersman Museum in Moscow.

The history archival and material relating to the egg , including a design first published by Kenneth Snowman, have been  exhaustively researched. Tatiana Muntian of the Kremlin Museum and Marianna Chistyakova of the Fersman Museum have examined them thoroughly. This brief article is a footnote to their considerable work and relates solely to the discovery of the inspiration for the egg.

The egg takes the form clock comprised of an ovoid celestial globe of dark blue glass supported, with rotating dial on a stand of billowing rock crystal clouds mounted by silver cherubs and stood on probably nephrite pedestal. The globe was decorated with a diamond studded engraving of the constellations under which Tsarevitch Alexei was born. Work begun on the egg but revolution and war overtook its production and it was never completed. In 2001 its unfinished clouds and globe were discovered in the collection of the Fersman Museum in Moscow. Where Fabergé’s son Agathon had left them in 1925

The forms of almost all of Fabergé’s Imperial Easter Eggs derive from works of art dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Most of the prototypes for the eggs have been identified. Some were direct pastiches of earlier works: the first Imperial egg, the Hen egg is indistinguishable from a number of eighteenth century enamelled eggs from Southern Germany, while the Renaissance egg is a direct copy of a casket by Le Roy now in the Green Vaults. Other eggs, such as the Kremlin egg, are

not exact copies but reinterpretations of earlier works.

The inspiration for the Constellation egg has not previously been noted. However its design is derived from that for an eighteenth century French bronze clock.

The clock was made for the Duchesse de Mazarin by the Parisian clock maker Jean-Baptiste Lepaute and modelled by Augustin Pajou. Pajou (1730-1809) was a prominent Parisian neo-classical sculptor who worked under the patronage of King Louis XV and contributed to the Royal Opéra at Versailles.

Pajou’s design for the clock developed from one he earlier conceived for the Prince de Condé and illustrated the popular conceit of love triumphing over time.   Several variants of the clock were made including that illustrated from The Wallace Collection. All incorporated celestial globes supported on clouds flanked by a figure of Father-time ensnared by cherubs in chains of roses. The Constellation egg’s cherubs, clouds and celestial globe are taken from Pajou’s design.

Fabergé may have become aware of the design from an existing clock or possibly from pen, ink and watercolor drawings of the clock now held in the Hermitage. Instead of copying the design directly he reinterpreted it to suit his needs and audience. Rather than bronze he used his own materials, rock crystal, nephrite and silver. He distilled the idea of love triumphing over time into cherubs scaling the clock and ingeniously used the globe to celebrate the birth of the recipient’s beloved son.

Tatiana Muntian concluded that as the egg is unfinished it is a symbol of the fall of the Russian monarchy and collapse of the House of Faberge. Now that the inspiration for the egg has been uncovered its original meaning is clearer. The Egg becomes a defiant declaration, in the face of revolution, of love’s indifference to time and circumstance. Of how temporal and ultimately bodily restraints could not bind the Tsar’s love for the Tsarina.