Christie’s auctions the Fabergé Winter Egg on December 2nd during Classic Week in London, estimated at over £20 million, one of six Imperial Eggs in private hands.
Despite multiple notable pieces of art hitting the market each year, this year, there is something truly spectacular heading to the blocks. The kind of item that has been at the forefront of legends, folklore and has been the inspiration to countless films and series.
An item harking back to a world of unrivalled glamour and mystery that has captivated minds since the Russian Revolution changed the course of history. Christie’s is putting The Fabergé Winter Egg up for auction on December 2nd during Classic Week in London.
They’re including it alongside Important Works by Fabergé from a Princely Collection, and for serious collectors, it doesn’t get much bigger.
A Record-Breaking Imperial Treasure
Emperor Nicholas II commissioned The Winter Egg in 1913 as an Easter gift for his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna.
The estimate? Over £20 million, and that’s by request only. This thing was made during the tercentenary celebrations of the Romanov Dynasty, which gives you an idea of how important it was even then.
Here’s what makes the auction history interesting. Christie’s sold it in 1994 after it had been missing for nearly twenty years. It set a world record for Fabergé. Then in 2002, it did it again. Broke its own record.
Only six other Imperial Easter Eggs are still in private hands. Six. The rest are locked up in museums. So when one comes up for sale, people pay attention.
Margo Oganesian, Christie’s Head of Department, Fabergé and Russian Works of Art, commented: “It is a privilege for Christie’s to be entrusted with the sale of the exquisite ‘Winter Egg’ by Fabergé for the third time in its history. With only six other Imperial Easter Eggs remaining in private collections, this is an extraordinary chance for collectors to acquire what is arguably one of Fabergé’s finest creations, both technically and artistically. It would undoubtedly enhance the most distinguished collection.”
An Ethereal Vision of Winter Transformed
The egg itself is carved from rock crystal. The inside has frost patterns engraved into it, like what you’d see on a window on a freezing morning. The outside is covered with platinum snowflake motifs set with rose-cut diamonds. It catches the light in a way that makes it look cold and brilliant at the same time.
Two vertical diamond-set platinum borders hide the hinge. There’s a cabochon moonstone with the date 1913 on it. The base is rock crystal shaped to look like melting ice, complete with platinum rivulets set with rose-cut diamonds that appear to trickle down. A platinum pin holds the whole thing together in the centre.
Now here’s the real payoff. Open the egg, and you find the “surprise” that every Imperial Easter Egg has. Hanging from a platinum hook is a basket, double-handled, made of platinum trelliswork and covered in rose-cut diamonds. Inside are white quartz wood anemones, spring flowers carved with incredible detail. Gold wire stems and stamens, centres with demantoid garnets. The leaves are nephrite, sitting in a bed of gold moss. The base says ‘FABERGÉ 1913’.
Nicholas II paid 24,600 roubles for this. That was a fortune. But the symbolism mattered to him and his family. Winter giving way to spring, death to resurrection, the whole Easter message wrapped up in platinum and diamonds and crystal.
The Visionary Designer: Alma Pihl
Most people don’t know that a woman designed this. Alma Pihl, born in 1888, was one of the very few female designers at Fabergé. She was largely self-taught but came from a family that knew jewellery inside and out. Her mother, Fanny Holmström, was the daughter of August Holmström, one of Fabergé’s workmasters. Her father, Oscar Pihl, ran Fabergé’s jewellery workshop in Moscow.
At twenty, Alma started working for her uncle Albert Holmström, the master craftsman who actually made The Winter Egg. She was supposed to create watercolour designs for the archives. But in her spare time, she sketched her own ideas. Her uncle saw what she could do and started having her designs made for the store.
She created two of the most famous Imperial Easter Eggs while working in Holmström’s workshop. The Winter Egg in 1913 and The Mosaic Egg in 1914, with the Mosaic Egg now in The Royal Collection in England.
The story of how she came up with the snowflake design is perfect. She looked out her frost-covered workshop window and watched ice crystals form ‘like a garden of exquisite frozen flowers’. That’s it. That’s where the idea came from. She figured out how to recreate those patterns in rock crystal, platinum, and rose-cut diamonds.
The Imperial Easter Egg Tradition
Between 1885 and 1916, Fabergé made fifty Imperial Easter Eggs. Emperor Alexander III started the tradition of giving eggs to his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna. He commissioned ten between 1885 and 1894. His son Nicholas II kept it going, ordering forty more eggs for his mother and his wife, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.
Forty-three still exist. Most are in museums. Seven, including The Winter Egg, are in private collections. That’s why every auction matters.
Franz Birbaum, Fabergé’s chief designer, wrote about the process in his 1919 memoirs: ‘The designs of the Easter eggs did not have to be approved by Court and Fabergé was given complete freedom in design and execution[…] Most Imperial Easter eggs took almost a year to complete. Work began soon after Easter and was hardly finished by Holy Week of the following year.’
That creative freedom is why these eggs are so inventive. Fabergé and his team could experiment, push boundaries, and try things that might not work. Sometimes they succeeded spectacularly.
A Fascinating Provenance
The Winter Egg has a provenance that reads like a thriller. After the 1917 Revolution, it went from St Petersburg to the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow with a bunch of other Imperial property.
In the 1920s, the Soviet government started selling off art treasures to get foreign currency. They sold Imperial Easter Eggs for almost nothing compared to what they were worth. Wartski of London bought The Winter Egg in the late 1920s or early 1930s for £450. Think about that – £450.
Wartski sold it in 1934 to Napier Sturt, 3rd Baron Alington, for £1,500. It eventually ended up with Sir Bernard Eckstein, a British art collector.
In 1949, it went to auction in London as the property of Sir Bernard Eckstein. Mr Arthur Bryan Ledbrook bought it for £1,700. When Ledbrook died in 1975, the egg vanished. Nobody knew where it was for nearly twenty years.
When it turned up again in 1994, the art world went crazy. Christie’s sold it in Geneva that year for 7,263,500 Swiss francs, a world record for Fabergé. In 2002, Christie’s sold it again in New York for $9,579,500. Another world record.
Christie’s Leadership in the Fabergé Market
Christie’s knows Fabergé. They hold the overall auction record, set in 2007 when The Rothschild Egg sold for £8.9 million in London. In 2021, they sold The Harry Woolf Collection for £5.2 million. People trust them with this stuff because they’ve handled the biggest sales.
Beyond The Winter Egg: Highlights from the Collection
The sale includes almost 50 lots of Fabergé pieces. Estimates run from £2,000 to £2 million. There’s a hardstone model of a Street Painter by Boris Fredman Cluzel from Petrograd in 1916.
It’s 14.6 centimetres high and estimated at £1,500,000–2,000,000.
A jewelled gold-mounted nephrite miniature Sleigh by workmaster Michael Perchin, St Petersburg, circa 1890. It’s 15.2 centimetres long and estimated at £350,000–450,000.
Then there’s a Fabergé Album of Designs from the Workshop of Henrik Wigström, 1911 to 1916, St Petersburg. It’s 43 by 32 centimetres and gives you a look inside how one of Fabergé’s most important workshops actually worked. Estimated at £500,000–800,000.
There’s also a jewelled and gold-mounted hardstone Cockerel by Henrik Wigström (£50,000–70,000), an imperial gem-set and guilloché enamel two-colour gold-mounted bell-push by Michael Perchin from 1899–1903 (£20,000–30,000), and a gem-set silver bell-push shaped like a Cat by Karl (Hjalmar) Armfelt (£30,000–50,000).
An Unmissable Moment for Collectors
This is the third time Christie’s has offered The Winter Egg. With only six other Imperial Easter Eggs available to private collectors worldwide, this opportunity is legitimately rare. Not marketing-speak rare. Actually rare.
The Winter Egg shows you everything Fabergé could do. Technical skill, innovative design, layers of meaning, and beauty that still work more than a century later. It connects art, history, and craftsmanship in a way that few objects do.
The auction happens on December 2nd during Classic Week in London. If you’re bidding or just watching, it’s going to be something. One of the world’s most celebrated works of decorative art, available again to a private collector. That doesn’t happen often.
