A brown bear, carved in agate with rose cut diamond eyes.

It seems that a pair of bears was kept on the Sandringham estate as late as the 1880s. Mrs Herbert Jones described how ‘two big bears in a pit, indifferent to spectators, calmly climb their accustomed pole’. According to Helen Cathcart, the bear pit was adjacent to York Cottage. It contained two bears called Charlie and Polly who ‘were dreaded by their keeper when he had to wash them every day’. They were eventually moved to London Zoo by the Prince of Wales (later King George V).

Chiselled on one paw C and on the other F, the initials of Carl Fabergé.

Text adapted from Fabergé's Animals: A Royal Farm in Miniature