Gifted by Emperor Nicholas II to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna on Easter Day, 1913: the Winter Egg

The glittering fingers of frost on the glassy surface of the egg are beautiful, and so very realistic that you almost expect it to be cold to the touch. The egg rests on what appears to be shard of ice. It is almost formless, as if it had just been plucked out of the frozen River Neva, but somehow it gently and securely cradles the egg. Little silvered rivulets run down this ice-stalagmite, as if a thaw were on its way.

Beneath the frosted shapes that occlude the transparent shell, a hint of something white is visible. The egg opens like a locket to reveal its secret: a hanging basket filled with wood anemones. The first forest flowers to bloom when the snows recede, they are confirmation that the long, cold night of the Russian winter is over, and springtime is near.

This is the Winter Egg, commissioned by Emperor Nicholas II from the firm of Fabergé, and presented to his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, on Easter Day, 1913. The gift of a Fabergé egg was a Romanov family tradition, inaugurated by Emperor Alexander III. He presented one to his wife — the same Maria Feodorovna — every year from 1885 on. Nicholas continued the custom after he came to the throne, in 1894 — and extended it by giving an egg to his wife, Empress Alexandra, as well as to his widowed mother.

For Fabergé, the imperial Easter eggs were a hugely prestigious commission, but also an annual headache. Work on next year’s eggs began as soon as this year’s were delivered. Emperor Nicholas’s desire for two eggs naturally doubled the creative pressure on Carl Fabergé and his teams of jewellers, who now had to come up with a brace of original ideas that were both different from each other and from every egg that had gone before.

The royal client was not consulted at any time, as he too liked to be surprised. Nicholas never knew what he was paying for until the eggs were brought to him in Holy Week. So the pressure on Fabergé was enormous. What if the gifts were not finished on time? What if the emperor didn’t like what he saw? ‘The days before delivery were anxious,’ wrote Franz Birbaum, Fabergé’s chief designer. ‘Everyone worried that something might happen to these objects at the last moment.’The Winter Egg of 1913 must have been an especially stressful undertaking, since it is so astonishingly delicate. The design is the work of a young woman named Alma Pihl. She had no training as a silversmith, but she was a fine artist, and she came from a family of jewellers from Finland. Several of her relatives were employed by Fabergé in St Petersburg and Moscow.

At the age of 20, Pihl went to work there too. Her job was to paint minutely accurate life-size watercolours of Fabergé’s creations. This was how the company recorded the precise appearance of stock items for its own archive. In her spare time, Alma sketched designs of her own, and some of this speculative work was noticed by her uncle, a workmaster named Albert Holmström. He realised that Alma’s talent was wasted as a copyist, and so took her into his own workshop. Some of her jewellery designs were put into production and sold as Fabergé pieces. A few years later, when Holmström crafted the Winter Egg, he was working to his niece’s design.

The resulting egg is in many ways a stunning departure from tradition. Most of the imperial eggs draw on art history — that is to say, the firm of Fabergé created Rococo eggs and Neoclassical ones, Baroque eggs and eggs in the style of old Muscovy. Some of the imperial eggs are decorated with miniature portraits of the emperors or of the royal family. The ‘surprises’ inside were often art objects in the broadest sense: a tiny replica of the Bronze Horseman (the equestrian statue of Peter the Great that symbolises the imperial capital); exquisitely painted landscapes depicting royal palaces; a bijou sculpture in gold of the beloved royal yacht Standart.

The uniqueness of the Winter Egg lies in the fact that it finds inspiration in the simplicity of nature. Every Russian knows the beautiful abstract shapes that frost can cast on a frozen window, and it is possible that Pihl conceived the idea for the Winter Egg while sitting at her bench in the Fabergé workshop one still, cold morning.

The naturalistic design is not the only outstanding thing about this egg. The approach to materials, too, is rare and peculiarly timeless. Rock crystal, from which the shell and the base are made, is not the most lavish choice — and it had been used in previous eggs to create a kind of ovoid display case. But the Winter Egg is different. Transparent quartz is deployed here, because in the right hands it can be made to emulate both hoar-encrusted glass and jagged ice. A beautiful material has been rendered priceless by the artistry invested in it, by an ineffable human touch.

There are, of course, plenty of precious metals and gems in the egg, too — but always they serve the design. The trickling meltwater on the craggy base is made of platinum, while the sparkling effect of the whole ensemble is produced by the careful placement of minuscule diamonds, more than 4,000 of them in all.

The surprise inside the egg is a separate work of art, and also a feat of botanical mimicry. The wood anemones are arranged informally in a woven basket that is made of platinum and set with rose-cut diamonds. Some of the windflowers — as wood anemones are also known — are fully in bloom, some still half-closed. Their pale petals are of white quartz, and at the centre of each head is a demantoid garnet set within a gold stamen. The leaves on the golden stems are carved from pale green nephrite.

The dowager empress must have been amazed and delighted with her Easter present. But she had possession of the egg for less than four years. The majority of the imperial eggs were moved to the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow for safekeeping by the provisional government that came to power when Nicholas II abdicated in February 1917. After the October Revolution, the Winter Egg came into the hands of the new communist rulers of Russia. Photographs taken in the 1920s show a posse of disapproving Bolsheviks standing behind a table laden with jewels and gems. In some of the pictures, the Winter Egg is present, one small item at a fantastical jumble sale.

And most of these things were indeed for sale. The Winter Egg was among many objects that the young Soviet regime sold off to ‘capitalists’, their mortal enemies, when the state was in desperate need of convertible currency. The Winter Egg found its way to an English collector, who made it safe from the ravages of the turbulent 20th century. The egg changed hands several times in subsequent years, then came up for auction at Christie’s in Geneva in 1994, and again in New York in 2002 — on both occasions achieving a world-record price for an object by Fabergé.

In all, 50 imperial Easter eggs were made, of which 43 survive. Seen through the prism of history, there is a special poignancy about this egg in particular. The year 1913, when the emperor gave it to his mother, was the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty — and also the Russian empire’s last year of peace. War broke out the following year; revolution engulfed Russia, and the country descended into civil strife. In the midst of that upheaval, Emperor Nicholas, his wife and children were murdered in a far-flung Siberian basement. So it is strange that one of the last happy things the House of Romanov had from Fabergé was this little masterpiece — an object that symbolises renewal and resurrection, that stands for the heartbreaking fragility of hope.

The Winter Egg and Important Works by Fabergé from a Princely Collection is on view from 27 November to 2 December 2025 at Christie’s in London

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