Blue Serpent Clock (Fabergé egg)
1895 Imperial Fabergé Egg
The Blue Serpent Clock egg is an Imperial Fabergé egg, one of a series of fifty-two jeweled eggs made under the supervision of Peter Carl Fabergé for the Russian Imperial Family. This egg features a clock and is a design that Fabergé repeated for the Duchess of Marlborough egg in 1902. Both pieces are based on the cercles tournants (revolving dial) urn clocks in the Louis XVI style with a snake to indicate the time. It is currently owned by Prince Albert II and is held in Monaco.
Design
The crafting of this Imperial egg is credited to Michael Perkhin of Fabergé's shop. The egg stands on a three-sided base of gold, blue, and opalescent white guilloché enamel. The three panels of the base feature motifs of raised gold in four colors, each representing an allegory of the countryside, an allegory of astronomy and a basket of flowers, not the "arts and sciences", as stated in some monographs on Fabergé. This base has been rotated several times, so each of its three side panels has become the front one at some point. However, a 1902 archival photo, taken during a charity Fabergé exhibition held at the Baron von Dervis Mansion in Saint Petersburg, reveals that the allegory of astronomy was originally at the front of the base.
A serpent, set with diamonds, coils around the stand connecting the base to the egg and up toward its center.
The public source identifies “Blue Serpent Clock (Fabergé egg)” as 1895 Imperial Fabergé Egg. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Blue, Serpent and Clock.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blue Serpent Clock (Fabergé egg)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.