The first, though less likely possibility, is that several of these bouquets were made as a personal commission by the Russian Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, mother-in-law to Catherine the Great, to be worn as corsage on grand occasions. Most of the empress’s jewelry was made in the 1750s, and this trembling brooch just may be one of them.
The second, and more likely assumption, is that the ancestors of the present owners likely saw the brooch in the Winter Palace of the Treasury of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, where the jewels of the earliest empresses were housed and exhibited until the revolution of 1917.