After the discovery of the 1913 imperial faberge winter egg how many eggs are still missing

1. The headline: Christie's-era tally — seven missing

When Christie's prepared and marketed the Winter Egg in advance of its 2025 auction, its catalogue and press coverage presented the commonly cited figure that 50 Imperial Easter eggs were made for the Romanovs and that 43 survive today, which implies seven remain missing from the Imperial series ^[1]; mainstream reporting on the Winter Egg’s sale echoed that same arithmetic, repeating that Fabergé created 50 Imperial eggs and that seven of them are still unaccounted for ^{[2] [3]}.

2. Why other counts say six (or different numbers): competing chronologies and definitions

Not all authorities use the 50-egg baseline: some chronologies and secondary accounts list 52 Imperial eggs in their catalogues, and when those sources subtract known survivals the result is often reported as 46 extant and six missing—an alternative framing that predates the Winter Egg’s recent publicity and reflects differences in dating, attribution and whether partially surviving elements count as a “survival” ^{[4] [5]}.

3. How discoveries shift the arithmetic—but not the confusion

High-profile recoveries, such as the Third Imperial Egg found in the U.S. and announced in 2014, have changed the roster of known survivors and have been used by specialist researchers to refine chronologies ^{[6] [7]}, yet rediscoveries do not resolve the underlying methodological split: if one starts from “50 made” then the Winter Egg’s public reappearance is counted among the 43 extant ^[1], but if one accepts older attributions or disputed commissions that push the list to 52 items the headline number of missing eggs shifts accordingly ^{[4] [5]}.

4. What “missing” actually means in this debate

“Missing” is not a single, neutral category: some lists count eggs known only from archival descriptions or catalog photographs as missing, others count eggs whose outer cases survive but whose “surprises” do not as partially lost rather than wholly missing, and cataloguers disagree about a few ambiguous objects that were designed but never delivered or that may have been private commissions rather than imperial presents—differences that produce the range of six-to-seven (and occasionally other) reported missing figures ^{[8] [9] [10]}.

5. The reporting reality: which figure to use for now

For readers taking the Winter Egg discovery and the 2025 Christie’s narrative as the current benchmark, the prevailing and widely quoted statement is that Fabergé produced 50 Imperial eggs and 43 survive, leaving seven still missing—this is the formulation used by Christie's, by multiple contemporary news outlets covering the Winter Egg sale, and by several market-oriented observers ^{[1] [2] [3]}. However, specialist Fabergé research sites and older historiographies that treat the Imperial sequence as 52 items continue to present different totals rooted in archival interpretation ^{[6] [4]}.

6. Bottom line and limits of reporting

Bottom line: following the Winter Egg’s public rediscovery and the Christie’s campaign, mainstream auction-house and art-market reporting states seven Imperial Fabergé eggs remain missing based on a 50-egg Imperial corpus ^{[1] [2] [3]}; this answer is constrained by competing chronologies and by differing definitions of “survive” versus “partial survival,” which means alternative totals (notably six missing) appear in reputable sources that use a 52-egg framework or count partial survivals differently ^{[4] [5]}. No single definitive global registry resolves these methodological differences in the public record cited here.