Fabergé's Winter Egg sold for £22.9 million at Christie's King Street, the highest price paid at auction for a work by the house.
Fabergé’s 1913 Winter Egg sold for £22.9 million at Christie’s King Street in St James’s on Tuesday 2 December 2025, a record at auction for any Fabergé work.
Nicholas II gave the egg to his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, at Easter 1913, the year of the Romanov tercentenary. Alma Pihl, 25, the daughter of the master of Fabergé’s Moscow workshop, designed it after watching ice crystals form on a workshop window.
The egg is carved from rock crystal and set with platinum and rose-cut diamonds in a pattern of snowflakes. It holds a basket of wood anemones carved in white quartz.
The Soviets sold the egg in 1917. It passed through Wartski and Lord Alington to Arthur Bryan Ledbrook, and vanished after his death in 1975. It resurfaced in 1994, and Christie’s sold it in Geneva that year and in New York in 2002, each time for a Fabergé record.
A Qatari collection held it until this sale, which passed the Rothschild Egg’s £8.9 million. Christie’s offered it with other important works by Fabergé from the same collection.