Overview

• The piece will be offered during Christie’s Classic Week in London on December 2, with the house estimating a price above £20 million and noting it is the third time it has handled the egg.
• Emperor Nicholas II commissioned the Winter Egg in 1913 as an Easter gift for his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna.
• After the 1917 Revolution it was sent to the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow before entering the international market, including a Wartski purchase for £450 and a 1934 sale to a British collector for £1,500.
• Believed lost from 1975 until 1994, it then achieved world-record prices at Christie’s in 1994 (7,263,500 Swiss francs) and again in 2002 (US$9,579,000).
• The egg is carved in rock crystal with an interior frost engraving and exterior platinum snowflake motifs set with rose-cut diamonds, and only six other Imperial Easter Eggs remain in private collections.