A rare crystal and diamond Fabergé egg considered the “Mona Lisa of the decorative arts” smashed records last night, selling for £22.9m at Christie’s in London to become the most expensive Fabergé egg ever sold at auction.
Known as the Winter Egg for its delicate frost and snowflake designs, the ovoid was among around 50 commissioned by Russia’s imperial family between 1885 and the eve of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Seven are believed lost since the Russian Revolution, and only seven remain in private hands.
The previous record for a Fabergé egg was set in 2007, also by Christie’s in London, when it sold another egg created for the Rothschild banking family for £8.9m.
The Winter Egg was created by Alma Theresia Pihl, one of the few women in Fabergé’s St Petersburg workshop, and fabricated by her uncle, Fabergé’s chief jeweler Albert Holmström. She is said to have come up with the design while gazing out of the window from her workshop where she saw ice crystals forming on the glass.
So intricate were their motifs, that each egg took the best part of a year to complete. This particular example marked the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty and is carved from rock crystal, a notoriously delicate material, and set with around 4,500 diamonds.
Inside the egg is a platinum basket filled with quartz flowers and green demantoid garnet leaves that evoke the coming of Spring. It was commissioned by Nicholas II as a gift to his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, who had received an egg every year from her husband, Alexander III, until his death in 1894.
Nicholas II paid 24,600 roubles for the egg, but the First World War broke out a year after it was delivered to him. The tsar was toppled by the Bolsheviks before the conflict ended and the treasure was quickly, and cheaply, sold off by the newly formed Soviet state.
Wartski, a British antique jewellery dealer, bought the egg for £450. It then passed through several private collections and was believed lost until it reappeared at Christie’s in Geneva in 1994 when it sold for CHF7.2m (£6.7m), a world record at the time. Eight years later, it again was sold by Christie’s in New York, where it again set a record of $9.6m.
