A quick lunch with Paddle 655, the man who bought the world's most expensive egg

A long, leisurely lunch in Arlington, St James’s, SW1, with Paddle 655. There has been much discussion in jewellery circles about the identity of Paddle 655. Those who witnessed him placing the winning bid for the Fabergé Winter Egg when it was auctioned by Christie’s a few months ago were able to describe the dog he had brought with him — a Bedlington whippet called Drummer — but not the man holding its lead.

He himself attributed his unexpected Scarlet Pimpernel status to the fact that so few people bother to attend even the important sales anymore. Auction rooms that would once have been packed to the gunwales with overexcited dealers, buyers and sellers are now dominated by anonymous banks of telephones and computers. I am delighted, therefore, to be able to reveal that the new guardian of the most expensive three-minute egg ever — it cost £22,895,000 and took only 165 seconds to buy — is none other than Kieran McCarthy, joint managing director of Wartski, the royal jewellers.

Between 1885 and 1917, Tsar Alexander III and later Tsar Nicholas II commissioned 50 bejewelled Easter eggs for the tsarinas — each containing a ‘surprise’ — from Fabergé. The first imperial egg was a white enamel shell that opened to reveal a solid-gold yolk, which itself opened to reveal a golden hen with ruby eyes. Inside the hen was a miniature diamond crown and a ruby pendant, both sadly now lost. The concept was inspired by an 18th-century ivory hen egg in the Danish Royal Collection, although it was an English king, Edward I, who, in 1290, actually came up with the idea of creating extravagantly decorated eggs as royal gifts.

The Winter Egg of 1913 is the most spectacular, inventive and unusual of the Imperial series. It was the only one designed by a woman, Alma Pihl, and is carved from rock crystal to resemble a piece of ice. The interior is engraved with frost patterns, and the exterior is set with hundreds of tiny rose-cut diamonds in platinum snowflake motifs. The ‘surprise’ is a platinum-and-diamond trellis basket holding a posy of finely carved white-quartz wood anemones with demantoid garnet centres representing spring.

Nicholas II paid 24,600 roubles for this particular egg — a small fortune at the time — especially when you consider that the materials used were relatively inexpensive. What makes the piece so valuable is the artistic expression, the workmanship, the provenance and the fact that it was conceived and made by Fabergé.

Peter Carl Fabergé took over his father’s St Petersburg jewellery shop in 1872 and in less than a decade had transformed it into the greatest jewellery house in the world. Carl was a creative, organisational and marketing genius. At the firm’s peak he employed about 500 craftsmen and, between 1882 and 1917, it is estimated that they produced more than 150,000 wonderful objects, from cigarette cases to gardening secateurs, from tiaras to bell pushes. He and his team rarely repeated an item — the house philosophy was one of constant invention and reinvention.

Did Fabergé help to create what might be considered a golden age of giving — at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, royals, aristocrats and the wealthy were constantly presenting each other with costly little joujoux — or was he just riding a wave? Either way, his beautiful, elegant and joyful pieces, eggs, figurines, flowers, animals, jewellery, accessories and objets de fantaisie alike, remain a byword for luxury.

I was amazed to learn from Kieran that it is possible to start collecting Fabergé with as little as £4,000–£5,000. A lot of money, I know, but perhaps not so much when one considers you would possess something that was made by the very same craftsmen who created the Winter Egg.

This is the second time that Wartski has purchased it. In 1927, the firm announced that it had spent £100,000 on acquiring seized Russian treasures, including the Winter Egg from the Soviet Antiquariat. The records show that it cost them £450 and that it was sold on for £1,500 in 1934. The egg changed hands several times after that, disappearing for almost 20 years, before being rediscovered in a shoebox hidden under a bed. Kieran says that now Wartski has it back, they are in no hurry to part with it again.

He is considerably more interested in hunting down the Nécessaire Egg, which the firm sold in 1952 to someone recorded only as ‘A Stranger’ and that hasn’t been seen since. Significantly, Kieran wears a 16th-century poesy ring with the inscription ‘Live in hope’.

This article first appeared in the April 15 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.