Fabergé Museum

The Fabergé Museum in St Petersburg is a private museum of decorative and applied art housed in the Naryshkin-Shuvalov Palace on the Fontanka River embankment. It was founded by the Link of Times cultural and historical foundation, established in 2004 by the entrepreneur Viktor Vekselberg. The formal opening took place on 19 November 2013, and the museum opened its doors to the general public in April 2014. Its director is Vladimir Voronchenko.

The core of the collection came from the holdings of works by the House of Carl Fabergé that belonged to the heirs of the American billionaire Malcolm Forbes, who over decades had sought out and acquired the firm's pieces at auction. In 2004 the Forbes heirs intended to sell the collection off lot by lot, but representatives of Vekselberg managed to buy it in its entirety, allowing the pieces to return to Russia.

The Naryshkin-Shuvalov Palace, which had previously housed the Friendship House with foreign peoples, was chosen for the display. The St Petersburg city administration leased the building to the foundation for 50 years. From 2006, restoration work went on for seven years, costing around 1.2 billion roubles, funded entirely from private sources without any state financing.

The Link of Times foundation owns more than four thousand items. The best-known part of the collection is its group of Fabergé Easter eggs: the display includes eight of the fifty-two Imperial Easter eggs (one belonging to the foundation was seized in the United Kingdom in 2022 under sanctions against Vekselberg), two of the seven Kelch family eggs, an egg made for Empress Maria Feodorovna outside the series of Imperial gifts, the Duchess of Marlborough egg, and an egg whose first owner remains unidentified. The collection also includes precious accessories, table silver and religious items by Fabergé and by the workshops that competed with it — Sazikov, Ovchinnikov, Khlebnikov and Rückert.

The exhibition occupies eleven halls of the palace: the Knights' Hall, the Red, Blue, Pale Blue, White and Gold drawing rooms, the Antechamber, the Gothic and Exhibition Halls, the Upper Buffet Room and the Beige Hall. The Exhibition Hall holds paintings by Aivazovsky, Bryullov, Makovsky and Siemiradzki; the Gothic Hall brings together Russian icons; and the Upper Buffet Room displays works by Impressionist painters, including Renoir and Korovin.

The museum also holds temporary exhibitions: in 2016 it hosted Russia's first Frida Kahlo retrospective, and in 2022–2023 an exhibition of Ural stone-carvers titled "The Russian Epic in Stone". Since 2014 the museum has had its own expert council of specialists in Fabergé's work.