The figures were joined in Fabergé’s world of fantasy by hardstone animal studies and the Fabergé Museum holds some of the firm’s finest animal carvings. The animals delighted Fabergé’s patrons and the Dowager Tsarina Marie Feodorovna was enchanted by them. The Imperial cabinet ledgers record her acquiring 233 examples from Fabergé between December 1891 and April 1916. She enjoyed arranging them in vignettes on tables in the Anichkov Palace. Her sister Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII of England shared her fascination with the animals.
The playfulness in Fabergé’s animal lapidary studies is further displayed in the Museum’s carving of an elephant modelled seated with its trunk lowered to the ground in the manner of a performing circus elephant. The fantasy of this carving is accentuated in it being cut from a block of fossilised wood.