< Historic Diamonds / Auctions
Diamond Fabergé Egg Fetches $30.2 Million at Historic Auction
Long shrouded in mystery and believed lost for two decades, the fabled Fabergé Winter Egg has resurfaced — and just shattered expectations at Christie’s, selling for £22.9 million ($30.2 million).
Published: December 2, 2025
Written by: Josie Goodbody
Out of the 50 Fabergé Imperial Eggs that were made for the last two Tsarinas of Russia, 44 are in existence, and only six are in private collections. One of these is The Winter Egg, bought 23 years ago at Christie’s in New York for $9.6M, by a Qatari prince, and today it sold for £22,895,000 ($30,200,000) at Christie’s in London.
Meet the Expert
- Josie Goodbody is a jewelry historian, novelist, and communications specialist with a passion for storytelling and the world of high jewelry.
- Goodbody is the author of the Jemima Fox mystery series, blending intrigue with dazzling jewels, and her work has appeared in the Daily Mail and Rapaport.
The Romanovs and the Legacy Behind the Fabergé Winter Egg
The Fabergé Winter Egg sits at the pinnacle of the 44 surviving Imperial Eggs, the first of which was commissioned by Russian emperor, Tsar Alexander III in 1885, as an Easter present for his wife, Tsarina Maria Feodorovna. She was enraptured by the beautiful white enamel egg with its gold interior concealing a tiny golden hen inside, that the emperor continued the tradition every year up until his death nine years later. Fabergé, by now the Imperial Jeweller, was given complete freedom to create whatsoever was deemed appropriate, the designs of which became increasingly elaborate. The only stipulation was that each egg contained a ‘surprise’.
When their son and heir, Tsesarevich Nicholas, became emperor, he doubled the commission—one for his mother, the dowager, and the other for the love of his life, Empress Alexandra, and the custom continued, except in 1904 and 1906 because of the Russo-Japanese War, until 1916; although two were started in 1917 but never completed because of the Revolution.
A Complete History of the Fabergé Winter Egg
This exquisite diamond-encrusted egg is one of two Imperial Eggs designed by Alma Pihl, the granddaughter of Fabergé’s workmaster August Holmstrom. Kieran McCarthy, world-renowned expert on Fabergé, revealed that this egg was the climax of perfection drawn from a series of jewels that were in fact created for Swedish-Russian tycoon, Emanuel Nobel, nephew of Alfred of the Nobel Prizes.
Emanuel Nobel was a generous host and liked to give presents to the guests of his extravagant dinner parties, placing them under their napkins. He was also an important Fabergé client. In late 1912, when he commissioned Alma Pihl to come up with a series of jewels for Nobel’s lucky friends, it was vital that she designed something wonderful.
Whilst summing up inspiration from her drawing table in Fabergé’s St. Petersburg atelier, she happened to look up and noticed that the windows in the roof were scattered with snowflakes.
Entranced, she designed a series which became known as the Winter Jewels, in which carved rock crystal was encrusted with platinum and natural diamonds to create frost and snowflake motifs. She then repeated this idea, even more sumptuously, with the 1913 Easter Imperial Egg for the Dowager Empress, Maria Feodorovna. As Kieran McCarthy says, this egg really does “eclipse almost all else, in terms of its beauty but also its incredible craftsmanship”.
Rock crystal is exceptionally difficult to carve without cracking, and as Margo Oganesian, head of Christie’s Fabergé and Russian Works of Art department, explains to Only Natural Diamonds, the procedure of applying platinum set with thousands of diamonds “would have been really hard to create.”
The Craftsmanship That Makes the Fabergé Winter Egg Unique
The Winter Egg is simply magnificent: some 1500 minuscule rose-cut diamonds are set in platinum on the quasi-transparent quartz shell to resemble sparkling snowflakes. A further 360 rose-cut diamonds are set on the rock crystal base, as though the ice is melting in rivulets.
The egg opens with brilliant-cut diamond hinges to reveal the ‘surprise’, which has approximately 1,380 additional rose-cut diamonds. This hidden treasure is a tiny platinum and diamond trellis basket, filled with a posy of finely carved white quartz wood anemones, the centre of each is set with a demantoid garnet. The leaves are delicately carved in nephrite and rise from a bed of gold moss. Fabergé wasn’t interested in placing large diamonds on the eggs, as the effect of the sheer amount of tiny diamonds supersedes any need for large ones.
Where the Fabergé Winter Egg Has Traveled Through History
After the fall of the Romanovs, The Winter Egg, along with hundreds of possessions belonging to the Imperial family, went to the Kremlin Armory in Moscow and were then sold in the 1920s, mostly to buyers in the United Kingdom and the United States. It was bought by Kieran’s company Wartski, who became the main dealers of the imperial jeweler’s objets d’art, and in 1934 went to Lord Alington of Crichel House in Dorset, for £1,500. Over the next few decades, it was bought and sold until it disappeared for two decades, considered tragically lost like several of the Imperial Eggs.
The Fabergé Winter Egg’s New Chapter
The Winter Egg is by no means the only high-carat diamond Imperial Egg; the Romanov Tercentenary, also from 1913, is set with 1,115 rose-cut diamonds on the shell showing portraits of the eighteen previous Tsars. While Alma Pihl’s Mosaic Egg, of 1914, has 690 rose-cut diamonds in the set in the platinum ‘shell’ along with rubies, sapphires, garnets, emeralds, topazes, and pearls, and a similar number on the stand of the cameo surprise, plus two brilliant cut diamonds.
But tonight, at Christie’s, the egg considered by the world’s foremost expert on Fabergé to be “the greatest of them all” will have a new owner this winter.
