Alma Pihl’s “Winter” Faberge Egg Design

You are looking at the most expensive Easter egg ever made: the famed “Winter” Fabergé egg created by Alma Pihl, the only woman designer of the iconic Russian jeweled eggs.

Alma (slide two) was brought into the Fabergé workshop because her father had been its leading jeweler. Since 1885, the company of Peter Carl Fabergé had produced “Imperial” jeweled eggs for the Russian royal family — exquisite, costly, private Easter gifts suggestive of the opulance of Europe’s last monarchies. Everyone living now knows how the Romanov family ended — like the French monarchy before its country’s revolution, the Romanovs had been stupifyingly blind to the conditions of the Russian populace — and so the eggs also harken to the World Wars and destruction brought about by Europe’s competing oligarchies.

“Winter” was Alma’s greatest creation. Because the jeweler worked next to a window that was prone to icing up with water crystals, she was inspired in several of her pieces to mimic this natural form. In 1913, the Tsar commissioned the Fabergé egg for the 300th anniversary of his dynasty as a gift for the dowager empress, Maria Feodorovna.

“Winter” has an exterior made of rock crystal and rose diamonds. As with many of the Fabergé eggs, “Winter” held a surprise inside — in this case, a flower basket made of platinum holding white “wood anemones” carved from white quartz, with garnet centers, leaves of nephrite, all resting on a bed of moss formed from Brown gold.

“Winter”, like all the Romanov eggs, left the royal family upon the Russian Revolution. Sold at auctions in 1996 and then 2005, for a time its owner was secret. However, Alma Pihl’s most famous creation is now in the possession of another royal family — it belongs to Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar.