As ATG went to press, Christie's South Kensington were conducting a final silver sale and MacDougall's auctions were still underway. Their first day of sales had brought in £7m, with another £3m-5m expected on Friday. Apart from these, totals for the week reached a premium-inclusive £92.5m.
Sotheby's realised their highest ever totals and held an evening sale for the first time, making it look increasingly as if Russian art has moved into third place in importance on the calendar after contemporary art and Impressionist and modern art.
It was a week of new records, but the thing everyone was talking about was the so-called Rothschild Fabergé Egg, which went under the hammer at Christie's on November 28 in front of a packed room and a bank of television cameras.
The egg became the most expensive piece of Fabergé, most expensive timepiece, and most expensive Russian art object ever sold at auction when the hammer came down at a premium-inclusive £9m, breaking the previous record set for the Fabergé Winter Egg at $9.6m (then £6.6m) at Christie's New York in April 2002.
It sold to Alexander Ivanov, head of the Russian National Museum, which is currently under construction in downtown Moscow and is funded by a group of Moscow collectors.
"We will not resell it," Mr Ivanov said later.
The elaborate 101/2in (27cm) high egg was made in St Petersburg in 1902 by Fabergé workmaster Michael Perchin, who gave it a silver body enamelled in translucent pink, a white enamel clock set with pearls to the front, and a rose-diamond set gold cockerel automaton to the top.
It is one of only three large Fabergé eggs incorporating both a clock and an automaton inspired by the famous ormolu automaton peacock egg in the Winter Palace. This example was a gift from Baron Edouard de Rothschild's elder sister Beatrice Ephrussito to her brother's fiancée, Germaine Alice Halphen on her engagement in Paris. The couple married in 1905. It remained in the family until now and was previously unrecorded, being publicly displayed for the first time at Christie's Moscow exhibition in October.
As is the case with all private commissions executed by the Fabergé workshops in St Petersburg, no documentary recording the order of the Rothschild egg survives. However, Christie's tracked down one piece of photographic evidence showing it being executed in the workshop of workmaster Michael Perchin.
By Stephanie Harris
