A $30.2 Million Fabergé Egg Commissioned by the Last Czar of Russia Sets a New Auction Record

On December 2, Christie’s set a new world auction record for Fabergé—the third in its history—after hammering the Winter Egg, designed by Alma Theresia Pihl, for a whopping $30.2 million in The Winter Egg and Important Works by Fabergé from a Princely Collection sale in London. That evening also saw works like The Martyrdom of Saint Paul, a monumental altarpiece of Peter Paul Rubens, and The Flute Player, the handiwork of Rembrandt pupil Gerrit Dou, sell in the Old Masters Evening Sale, which combined with the Fabergé sale brought in more than $53.5 million.

In both its majesty and its provenance, the Winter Egg—one of fifty surviving Imperial Easter eggs commissioned by members of the Romanov dynasty—was pristine. The commissioning of Fabergé eggs became an Easter tradition among Russian emperors beginning in 1885, when Czar Alexander III gifted the very first Hen Egg—a marvelous white ovoid that opened to reveal a golden yolk in which there nestled a golden hen—to his wife. Czar Nicholas II carried on the tradition his father started, giving Fabergé eggs to his mother and his wife every year. The Winter Egg was a 1913 gift from Nicholas II to his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna. It’s one of just two surviving Fabergé eggs designed by Alma Pihl—who was widely considered one of the greatest talents to emerge out of the luxury atelier. Pihl was inspired by a winter’s day, when she gazed upon her frosted windowpane and marveled at the fractaled snowflakes frosting the surface “like a garden of exquisite frozen flowers.”

The Winter Egg rests on a pearlescent rock crystal formation that imitates a glacier, melting into diamond-studded rivulets. Delicately rendered in rock crystal, the egg is latticed in a gossamer snowflake motif, with each flurry traced in inlaid platinum, and studded with approximately 4,508 diamonds. While robust in its materiality, it evokes the ephemerality of ice and winter—a theme that extends to the egg’s concealed “surprise.” The frigidity of winter literally, and metaphorically, gives way to the glory of spring when the Winter Egg opens to reveal a bejeweled platinum basket cradling a bouquet of white quartz anemones blossoming through a spray of gold moss.  

The egg was purchased in the 1920s by a London dealer for a relatively small sum when the Soviet government sold off treasures following the Russian Revolution, and it has since been sold at auction several times, with each sale breaking records. Yesterday’s sale set a new world auction record for any work by the legendary atelier. According to Margo Oganesian, Fabergé and Russian Works of Art department head, the sale reaffirms “the enduring significance of this masterpiece” and celebrates “the rarity and brilliance of what is widely regarded as one of Fabergé’s finest creations, both technically and artistically.” The Fabergé sale as a whole, she added, attracted fierce competition from bidders around the world.

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