Fabergé egg made for Russian tsar smashes auction record

A rare 1913 imperial ‘winter egg’ commissioned for Nicholas II has been sold for $30.2 million

A Fabergé Imperial ‘Winter Egg’ commissioned for Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, sold for a record £22.9 ($30.2 million) at Christie’s in London on Tuesday, the auction house has announced.

According to Christie’s, the public sale lasted about three minutes, and the buyer was not identified.

The 1913 egg was made for Nicholas II to give his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, as an Easter gift. It was carved from rock crystal and decorated with platinum and rose-cut diamond-set snowflake motifs, the auction house said, with a base designed as melting ice.

Inside is a removable “surprise” – a diamond-set platinum basket holding carved quartz wood anemones with nephrite leaves and garnet centers.

The price exceeded Christie’s presale estimate of more than £20 million, Reuters reported.

“This is one of (the) Imperial Easter Eggs created by Faberge for the Romanovs. And the Winter Egg is arguably the best of them all,” Margo Oganesian, Christie’s head of department for Fabergé and Russian works of art, told the outlet.

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The ‘Winter Egg’ was designed – unusually for the time – by a woman jeweler, Alma Pihl. Legend has it that Pihl, the niece of Fabergé’s chief jeweler, Albert Holmstrom, got the idea after watching ice crystals form on a shop window at her workshop.

Fabergé’s gem-studded eggs were made for Nicholas II and his predecessor, Alexander III, who presented them as Easter gifts to members of the imperial family. Each typically took about a year to design and produce, and the tsars generally commissioned a new, lavish piece soon after the previous one was delivered.

The historic St. Petersburg jeweler made the imperial eggs for Russia’s Romanov family, and 43 are known to survive. The ‘Winter Egg’ is one of seven still in private hands, while the rest are either missing or held by institutions and museums.

The Winter Egg disappeared in 1975 and was rediscovered in 1994, according to the auction house. Christie’s has sold it twice before – in Geneva in 1994 and New York in 2002 – setting record prices on both occasions, Reuters reported. The Rothschild Fabergé Egg fetched $18.5 million in 2007.