【London, UK】This Rare Fabergé Egg Might Set a World Record at Auction for the Third Time in Its History

Commissioned by the Russian Emperor Nicholas II, the diamond-covered Winter Egg is expected to fetch $27 million when it goes under the hammer in London on December 2.

For the imperial families at the helm of Russia’s empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even Easter eggs were sometimes made of diamonds. Between 1885 and 1916, the luxury jewelry firm House of Fabergé created 50 decadent Imperial Easter Eggs for the Russian imperial family. One of them is expected to fetch a record-setting $27 million at an auction held by Christie’s in London on December 2—its third time going under the hammer.

Thought to be lost for almost two decades, the Winter Egg was first sold by Christie’s at a Geneva auction in 1994. It sold for 7,263,500 Swiss francs, setting the world record for a Fabergé item. Eight years later, the egg cracked the same record when it went for $9,579,500 at another Christie’s auction in New York.

Carved in rock crystal, the Winter Egg is an ode to the transition into spring. The egg’s shell is adorned with a rose-cut diamond-set platinum snowflake pattern. It opens to reveal a hanging platinum basket set with rose-cut diamonds, which holds a bouquet of white flowers. The egg sits upon a rock-crystal base that mimics a block of melting ice.

The piece is “richly imbued with clear Easter symbolism,” per Christie’s description. “It represents the idea of resurrection, capturing the shift from winter’s harshness to the vibrant renewal of spring.”

Commissioned in 1913 by the emperor Nicholas II as an Easter present for his mother, the Winter Egg was designed by one of the rare female designers at House of Fabergé: Alma Pihl. Born into a family of Finnish jewelers who worked for the firm, Pihl’s first job was watercoloring life-size renditions of Fabergé designs for the company’s archival records.

But in her free time, Pihl sketched her own ornate designs, which caught the attention of her uncle, Albert Holmström. He ordered some of her designs to be executed by Fabergé, kicking off her career as a designer. Her drawings were the basis for the Winter Egg and the Mosaic Egg of 1914, which is now in the United Kingdom’s Royal Collection.

From design to creation, most Imperial Easter Eggs took almost a year to complete, wrote Franz Birbaum, Fabergé’s chief designer, in his 1919 memoirs. “Work began soon after Easter and was hardly finished by Holy Week of the following year,” he wrote. The jewelry house had complete creative control over the design of the eggs, he noted.

Before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the country saw “this last gasp of imperial patronage colliding with craftsmanship,” Fabergé expert Kieran McCarthy told CNN’s Susannah Cullinane in 2015. Russian rulers’ “daily lives were lived at such a height of luxury that you couldn’t really excite them with anything of intrinsic value. It was always about the craftsmanship.”

The decadent egg tradition came to an end with the revolution, during which the czars were overthrown and the Fabergé family fled Russia. The Bolsheviks confiscated many of the Easter Eggs, some of which they sold.

At that time, “the ‘bourgeois’ commodities valued by the old regime had been branded ideologically worthless and immoral,” wrote Apollo magazine’s Digby Warde-Aldam in 2014. “The Fabergé eggs—almost all of which were in the hands of the government—were almost certainly the most reprehensible symbols of the past.”

According to Christie’s, a jeweler in London purchased the Winter Egg for just £450 in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It subsequently passed through the hands of a number of English collectors and ultimately vanished for two decades, until it was rediscovered and auctioned in 1994.

Of the 50 Imperial Easter Eggs made at the turn of the century, 43 have survived. Most of them are in museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Hillwood Estate in Washington, D.C.; the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond; and the Fabergé Museum in St. Petersburg. Only seven are in private collections, including the soon-to-be-auctioned Winter Egg.