Courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art
Recent Discoveries
THE REDISCOVERY OF THE SERPENT EGG CLOCK by Geoffrey Munn
I am patron of the Lowestoft branch of the Samaritans. In the early 1990s, I decided to mount a Fabergé exhibition at Wartski in aid of the charity. At the time there was very little doubt that Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother would lend as she had always done — the famous cornflower studies were her dazzling contribution. For the first time, the Prince of Wales lent the now famous seal in the form of the nephrite frog and his rock crystal and blue enamel cufflinks. The Royal Dukes of Gloucester and Kent lent all manner of delicious things. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands sent in a charming study of an elephant.
Although this was already a formidable list of lenders, it was essential to attract huge publicity and, for the sake of the charity, I was hungry for more.
My journey home was (and always is!) by bus. The n°137 stopped at Clapham, and out of the blue it occurred to me that Prince Rainier of Monaco might be willing to help; however, my hopes of a loan extended to little more than a gold cigarette case or something of that sort. The glamour of the Grimaldi name in the catalogue was all I wanted and almost all I dared to hope for. The following day I dashed off a letter on Wartski notepaper and, during the ensuing weeks, completely forgot that I had written it.
Some time later, Wartski’s front door was pushed open by Virginia Gallico (widow of the famous author Paul) who introduced herself as lady-in-waiting to His Serene Highness. To my delight, she said that the Prince was willing to contribute to the Samaritans exhibition by lending a blue enamelled diamond-encrusted clock, nearly 8 inches high. As the description was hardly typical of any Fabergé clock I had ever seen, I tried to disguise my concerns about its authenticity. Virginia Gallico is an extraordinarily intuitive character and detected a shadow of doubt flicker across my face. As we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and, at that moment, it seemed I had already blundered some way down it!
The only way to allay my doubts was to ask for a photograph; Mrs. Gallico promised to fax me one as soon as she returned to Monaco. The fax was still a new - and slightly mysterious - addition to Wartski's system of communications. The following week I was standing beside it in the packing room when it painfully and slowly delivered a dark and fuzzy image. I quickly recognized the extremity of something very familiar. It was none other than the Serpent Egg Clock which Wartski sold to Stavros Niarchos for £64,103 on Christmas Eve 1972. The last time I had seen it was when I was just nineteen and had been working at Wartski for eight weeks.
During the twenty years in between, the Serpent Egg Clock had joined the company of Imperial Easter Eggs that were considered, to all intents and purposes, completely lost to scholarship. Although Prince Rainier knew the clock was by Fabergé, it was evident that Mr. Niarchos had neglected to tell him that it was one of Fabergé's famous Imperial Easter Eggs. In 1992, the Prince's surprise was compounded when I told him not only the true provenance of his egg but also the present value of this lovely object — it exceeded his wildest imaginings.
The Prince had asked me to go to the Palace to collect the Easter Egg in person and His Serene Highness was everything I expected. He exuded grace, wit and charm in a curiously English manner. The Serpent Egg Clock was standing in a modern rectangular vitrine with all manner of objects of vertu, some of which I recognized as coming from Wartski. After the initial excitement of seeing the Egg again had abated, the Prince gave me a lengthy tour of the Palace and we went from floor to floor in an old fashioned lift accompanied by his favourite dog.
The conductor of this extraordinary sequence of events was Virginia Gallico who, with her perfect sense of diplomacy, had suggested delicately that I “bring black-tie to Monaco just in case”. That afternoon I answered a telephone call in my hotel asking if I might care to join the Prince at the Opera. There I saw Marie Stuarda by Donizetti from the splendour of the Royal Box!
The following day I was sitting in a helicopter with the Easter Egg tucked under my seat. As we circled Monaco, on the first step of my journey back to London, I was almost sick with excitement.
Thanks to the Prince’s kindness, the Egg was the star of the Samaritans exhibition, Fabergé from Private Collections. The press were delighted with the story of its rediscovery… and the charity was thrilled with the very considerable proceeds it generated.
November 2008
