The Winter Egg, a historic Fabergé egg, is up for sale: worth 20 million.
On December 2nd, Christie’s will be selling The Winter Egg, along with other Fabergé works from a royal collection. The Winter Egg is estimated to be worth over 20 million pounds and was commissioned by Russian Emperor Nicholas II in 1913.
The egg is the fruit of the creative genius of Fabergé’s most celebrated designer, Alma Theresia Pihl, and crafted by her uncle, master craftsman Albert Holmström. The jewel is also among Fabergé’s richest imperial creations, one of the most original Easter eggs the Maison has ever created for the imperial family. The Fabergé collection for sale comprises nearly 50 lots, including semiprecious stone figures, animals, objets de virtu, and furniture, with estimates ranging from £2,000 to £2 million.
The Winter Egg
The Winter Egg is carved from rock crystal, delicately engraved on the inside with a frosted pattern, while the outside is decorated with platinum snowflake motifs set with rose-cut diamonds. Two vertical platinum diamond edges conceal a side hinge and a cabochon moonstone dated 1913. The egg rests on a rock crystal base shaped like a block of melted ice, decorated with platinum streamers set with rose-cut diamonds. A platinum pin at the center supports the egg, opening to reveal a double-handled platinum basket with latticework, suspended from a hook. It is encrusted with rose-cut diamonds and filled with intricately carved white quartz anemones, each spring flower with a gold-wire stem and stamens, the center set with a demantoid garnet, and the delicately carved nephrite leaves emerging from a bed of golden moss. The base of the basket is engraved with the Fabergé 1913 logo. It was commissioned at the extraordinary cost of 24,600 rubles.
The Designer
The designer, Alma Pihl (1888–1976), was one of the very few female designers at the House of Fabergé. She was largely self-taught and exceptionally talented. She was born into a family of Finnish jewelers and worked for Fabergé. Her mother, Fanny Holmström, was the daughter of Fabergé’s workshop director, August Holmström, and her father, Oscar Pihl, headed the Fabergé jewelry workshop in Moscow. In 1908, at the age of twenty, Alma began working for her uncle Albert Holmström, creator of The Winter Egg, creating life-size watercolors that served as archival records of the workshop’s creations. In her spare time, she drew her own designs. Her uncle recognized Alma’s talent and ordered some of her designs to be produced for the warehouse. This marked the beginning of her career. While working as a designer in Holmström’s workshop, Alma created her two most famous designs, Snowflake and Mosaic, which were embodied in two of the most extraordinary Imperial Easter eggs: the current batch, The Winter Egg of 1913, and The Mosaic Egg of 1914, now in the Royal Collection in England.
The History of Fabergé and Imperial Eggs
Fabergé’s worldwide reputation is synonymous with the unparalleled series of Imperial Easter Eggs, produced by the House between 1885 and 1916. Only fifty of these eggs were ever completed: ten were created during the reign of Emperor Alexander III between 1885 and 1894, all of which were gifted by the Tsar to his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna. From 1895 onward, Nicholas II continued the tradition, gifting forty more to both his mother and his wife, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Forty-three of the Imperial series eggs still exist, most of which are now held in major museums around the world, while only seven (including the Winter Egg) remain in private hands.
Provenance
After the 1917 Revolution, the Winter Egg was moved from St. Petersburg to the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow, along with many other valuable possessions of the imperial family. In the 1920s, the newly formed Soviet government began selling art treasures from the Hermitage and other national collections, including personal effects of the Romanovs, to collectors and dealers in Europe and the United States, often for a fraction of their value. The Winter Egg was purchased by Wartski of London in the late 1920s or early 1930s for £450. Wartski sold the Egg in 1934 to Napier Sturt, 3rd Baron Alington, for £1,500. It subsequently entered the collection of Sir Bernard Eckstein and was sold at auction in London in 1949 to Arthur Bryan Ledbrook for £1,700. The Egg disappeared in 1975 after Ledbrook’s death. In 1994, it was rediscovered and sold at Christie’s in Geneva for 7.2 million Swiss francs. In 2002, it was auctioned again at Christie’s, this time in New York, where it again set a world record of $9.6 million.
