(CNN) — One of the last Fabergé eggs in private hands sold Tuesday for £22.9 million ($30.2 million), with fees, breaking its own record as the most expensive work by the Russian jeweler ever to appear at auction.
Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II as a gift for his mother in 1913, the Winter Egg went to an unidentified buyer following a 3-minute bidding battle at Christie’s auction house in London. The record sum exceeded Christie’s pre-sale estimate of £20 million ($26 million).
The astronomical price tag reflects the growing rarity of the House of Fabergé’s Imperial Eggs, none of which has been seen at auction in over 23 years. The historic St. Petersburg jewelry house only ever made 50 of them, and the Winter Egg is one of just seven left in private hands. The others are either missing or owned by institutions or museums.
The bejeweled eggs were produced for Nicholas II and his predecessor Alexander III, who presented them as Easter gifts to family members between 1885 and 1916. Each took around a year to design and produce, with the tsars typically ordering the ornate items shortly after the latest had been delivered.
Prior to Tuesday’s sale, the head of Christie’s Fabergé and Russian artworks department, Margo Oganesian, described the Winter Egg as “the most spectacular, artistically inventive and unusual” of the 50.
“Most of them are based on historical styles — of Rococo or Neoclassicism — but the Winter Egg is an object in its own style,” she said over the phone to CNN, adding “the design is timeless — it’s so modern.”
Made primarily from rock crystal, or clear quartz, the Winter Egg was designed to resemble a block of ice dusted with frost. Its exterior features a snowflake motif made from platinum and 4,500 rose-cut diamonds. Inside lies one of Fabergé’s signature “surprises”: a tiny hanging basket filled with wood anemones made from white quartz, nephrite and garnets.
The Winter Egg’s design was — unusually for the time — the work of a female jeweler, Alma Pihl. Legend says that Pihl, the niece of Fabergé’s chief jeweler Albert Holmström, came up with the idea after seeing ice crystals forming on a window by her workshop bench.
Nicholas II purchased it for 24,600 rubles, the third-highest sum Fabergé ever charged for a work, according to invoices published by Christie’s.
According to Kieran McCarthy, co-managing director at Wartski, a British antique jewelry dealer specializing in the works of Peter Carl Fabergé, the Winter Egg’s price tag reflects the craftsmanship required to turn “precious materials into a moment of nature.”
The thousands of diamonds are so small that they have “no intrinsic value,” he added, in a call with CNN, prior to the auction. “The value comes purely in the artistic expression of them and the use of them to create this scintillating idea of frost.”
“It’s like holding a lump of ice in your hand,” he said.
The Winter Egg passed through numerous private collections after Nicholas II’s imperial government was overthrown during the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was among the treasures sold off by the Bolsheviks to raise funds for their new Soviet state, and was purchased by Wartski in the late 1920s or 1930s for just £450 (roughly $30,000 in today’s money). It was then held in various private British collections before disappearing in 1975.
The egg reappeared in 1994, when it fetched over 7.2 million Swiss francs (then $5.6 million) at Christie’s in Geneva. That marked a new auction record for a Fabergé egg — one it broke again in New York in 2002, when it changed hands for $9.6 million.
That was the last time any Imperial Egg appeared at auction, though in 2007 a jeweled egg that Fabergé made for a member of the Rothschild banking family went under the hammer for over £8.9 million (then around $18.5 million).
In 2015, an anonymous American man purchased a long-lost Imperial Egg (estimated by some experts to be worth £20 million, or $33 million at the time) for just $14,000 at a flea market. It has yet to appear at auction.
The Winter Egg was part of a wider sale of almost 50 other House of Fabergé objects — spanning bejeweled pendants, decorative boxes and whimsical miniatures — put up for auction by an unidentified royal. Known for protecting its clients’ privacy, Christie’s described the items only as coming from a “princely collection.”
In a statement following the sale, Oganesian said that the new record “reaffirmed the enduring significance” and “rarity and brilliance of what is widely regarded as one of Fabergé’s finest creations, both technically and artistically. This was an exceptional and historic opportunity for collectors to acquire a work of unparalleled importance.”
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