A rare Fabergé egg created from crystal and adorned with diamonds sold for £22.9 million (around $30.2 million) on Tuesday at Christie’s London, where the price broke the record as the highest ever for a Fabergé egg at auction. The sale was the top billing in “The Winter Egg and Important Works by Fabergé from a Princely Collection,” whose 48 lots brought in a total of £27.8 million ($37.1 million).
The so-called Winter Egg was created for Russia’s imperial family, one of 50 such lavish creations commissioned between 1885 and the Russian Revolution in 1917. As reported in The Art Newspaper (TAN), seven are thought to have been lost, and seven remain in private hands, outside of institutions.
“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,” TAN writes. “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.”
Christie’s described the Winter Egg as “among the most lavish of Fabergé’s Imperial creations” and “widely regarded as one of the most original and artistically inventive Easter eggs the house produced for the Imperial family.” Margo Oganesian, the chief of Christie’s Russian art department, called it “the Mona Lisa of the decorative arts”. Adding, “It’s really hard to comprehend how Faberge created it.” The egg is adorned with 4,000 diamonds and opens to show anemones carved from white quartz.
The treasure had been thought to be lost before it went up for sale at Christie’s in Geneva in 1994, when it set a record for the time. It then sold again, for $9.6 million, at Christie’s in New York in 2002.
The previous record for a Fabergé egg was set at Christie’s in London in 2007, when the sale of another one went to the Rothschild banking family for £8.9 million ($11.9 million).
