Cracked it: rare crystal and diamond Fabergé egg sells for record £22.9m in London – The Art Newspaper

A uncommon crystal and diamond Fabergé egg thought-about the “Mona Lisa of the ornamental arts” smashed information final night time, promoting for £22.9m at Christie’s in London to turn into the most costly Fabergé egg ever offered at public sale.

Often called the Winter Egg for its delicate frost and snowflake designs, the ovoid was amongst round 50 commissioned by Russia’s imperial household between 1885 and the eve of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Seven are believed misplaced for the reason that Russian Revolution, and solely seven stay in personal arms.

The earlier report for a Fabergé egg was set in 2007, additionally by Christie’s in London, when it offered one other egg created for the Rothschild banking household for £8.9m.

The Winter Egg was created by Alma Theresia Pihl, one of many few ladies in Fabergé’s St Petersburg workshop, and fabricated by her uncle, Fabergé’s chief jeweler Albert Holmström. She is alleged to have provide you with the design whereas gazing out of the window from her workshop the place she noticed ice crystals forming on the glass.

So intricate had been their motifs, that every egg took the very best a part of a yr to finish. This explicit instance marked the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty and is carved from rock crystal, a notoriously delicate materials, and set with round 4,500 diamonds.

Contained in the egg is a platinum basket stuffed with quartz flowers and inexperienced demantoid garnet leaves that evoke the approaching of Spring. It was commissioned by Nicholas II as a present to his mom, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, who had obtained an egg yearly from her husband, Alexander III, till his dying in 1894.

Nicholas II paid 24,600 roubles for the egg, however the First World Struggle broke out a yr after it was delivered to him. The tsar was toppled by the Bolsheviks earlier than the battle ended and the treasure was rapidly, and cheaply, offered off by the newly fashioned Soviet state.

Wartski, a British vintage jewelry vendor, purchased the egg for £450. It then handed by a number of personal collections and was believed misplaced till it reappeared at Christie’s in Geneva in 1994 when it offered for CHF7.2m (£6.7m), a world report on the time. Eight years later, it once more was offered by Christie’s in New York, the place it once more set a report of $9.6m.