A Faberge egg given as a gift to the mother of the last Russian Tsar has sold for £22.9 million to set a new record for the jeweller’s signature item.
The Winter Egg was sold to an anonymous bidder by Christie’s in London on Tuesday, December 2.
The previous most valuable Faberge egg was sold for £8.9 million in 2007.
The winter egg was designed for Faberge by Alma Pihil and supplied to Tsar Nicholas II in 1913. He gave it to his mother, Tsarina Maria Feodorovna.
It is encrusted with 1,660 diamonds that mimic ice crystals. Once opened, the egg reveals the spring to come in the shape of a platinum and gold flower basket – decorated with an additional 1,378 diamonds. It is 8.2cm high and made – by Carl Fabergé – largely of rock crystal.
The last Tsar with his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, and Britain’s King Edward VII (an uncle by marriage) sailing in 1908. The wealth of the Romanov family bought them an extraordinary lifestyle, include annual Easter gifts of precious eggs.
Tsar Nicholas, who was deposed in the February Revolution of 1917 and later killed with his immediate family, paid almost 25,000 roubles for the egg to make it the most expensive then made.
In the chaos of the revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union royal property was seized by the new state, looted, and smuggled abroad.
The Winter Egg became state property but was sold to a private collector as the new state – which was isolated and sanctioned from its birth – tried to raise hard cash.
An English collector owned it for a while before it twice set auction records for Faberge eggs, selling for $5.6 million in 1994 and $9.6 million in 2002.
Of the 43 known surviving Russian imperial Easter eggs the Winter Egg is considered by many to be the finest. Fifty were commissioned and most are now in museums, with just seven known to be in private hands.
Margo Oganesian told the AFP: “Today’s result sets a new world auction record for a work by Fabergé, reaffirming the enduring significance of this masterpiece.”
