Editor’s Note
A Fabergé Easter egg has shattered auction records, selling for $30.2 million to become the most expensive piece of Russian jewelry ever sold at auction.
An Easter egg created by the House of Fabergé was auctioned for $30.2 million, equivalent to approximately 80 trillion Vietnamese dong, breaking its own record to become the most expensive work by a Russian jeweler ever sold at auction.
The Winter Egg, commissioned in 1913 by Tsar Nicholas II as a gift for his mother, was sold at Christie’s in London to an anonymous buyer. This record price far exceeded Christie’s pre-sale estimate of $26 million. This exorbitant price reflects the extreme rarity of Fabergé’s “Imperial Eggs,” as this piece had not appeared at auction for over 23 years. The historic St. Petersburg jeweler created only 50 of these Easter eggs, and this one is one of only seven known to be in private hands. According to CNN, the remaining seven are either lost or held by institutions and museums.
These jewel-encrusted Easter eggs were made for Nicholas II and his predecessor Alexander III, and were presented to the imperial family as Easter gifts between 1885 and 1916. Each design and fabrication took about a year, and the tsars often ordered the next elaborately decorated piece as soon as the latest one arrived. Ahead of Tuesday’s auction, Oganesian described this egg as “the most spectacular, the most artistically creative, and the rarest” of the 50.
Made primarily of crystal, or transparent quartz, the egg is designed to resemble a block of ice covered in frost. The exterior is adorned with platinum snowflake motifs and 4,500 rose-cut diamonds. Inside is one of Fabergé’s signature “surprises”: a small hanging basket containing a wooden anemone made of white quartz, jade, and garnet. The egg’s design was unusual for its time and was the work of a female jeweler, Alma Pihl. Legend has it that Pihl, the granddaughter of Fabergé’s head workmaster Albert Holmström, got the idea after seeing ice crystals form on a window next to her grandmother’s workbench.
According to an invoice published by Christie’s, Nicholas II purchased the egg for 24,600 rubles. This was the third-highest price Fabergé had ever set for a piece. According to Kieran McCarthy, co-managing director of Wartski, a UK antique jewelry shop specializing in the work of Peter Carl Fabergé, the egg’s price reflects the craftsmanship required to “transform precious materials into a moment of nature.”
The Easter egg passed through several private collections after the fall of Nicholas II’s regime in the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was later kept in various private collections in the UK but disappeared from view in 1975. It resurfaced in 1994 and was sold at a Christie’s auction in Geneva for $5.6 million.