The Winter Egg by Fabergé, £19.5m at Christie’s in London.
Offered with a third-party guarantee, meaning it was always bound to sell at the auction on December 2, it had an ‘estimate on request’ in excess of £20m. With the bidding opening at £17m, two bidders competed for the lot – one on the phone and the eventual buyer, a representative Wartski, who was in the room.
The dealership posted on Instagram that the egg was now 'returning to the Wartski nest'. According to the Christie's catalogue, it had been with the London firm after being acquired in the Soviet Union between 1929-1933 for £450. As with many other Imperial Eggs, it was sold by the Soviet government to generate foreign currency.
The egg was subsequently illustrated in Geoffrey Munn's 2015 book Wartski: The First One Hundred and Fifty Years.
The price at Christie's represented an auction record for a work by Fabergé.
The egg previously sold at Christie’s in Geneva in 1994, where it made SwF7.26m (£3.54m) including premium – a record for a Fabergé item sold at auction at that time. It then sold again at Christie’s New York in 2002, this time making $9.58m (£6.62m), again setting a Fabergé record.
Easter gift
Known as The Winter Egg, it was commissioned by Russian Emperor Nicholas II as an Easter gift to his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, in 1913, the year of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov Dynasty. It was the third most expensive item ever made by Fabergé.
Only 50 Imperial Easter Eggs were ever completed by Fabergé, most of which are now housed in museums, with just a handful remaining in private collections.
The Winter Egg was designed by Alma Pihl (1888-1976) and executed by her uncle, workmaster Albert Holmström. Alma was the most celebrated female designer at the House of Fabergé.
It is carved in rock crystal with diamond-set platinum snowflake motifs on the outside and an interior engraved with a frost design. It is on a rock-crystal base formed as a block of melting ice, opening to reveal the ‘surprise’ – a jewelled platinum basket, full of finely carved white quartz wood anemones, emerging from a bed of gold moss.
