The extraordinary story began earlier this year, when a Frenchwoman living abroad decided to sell furniture and sundries from her late mother’s home in Brittany.
After ordering Jean-Pierre Osenat’s auction house to sell it, the vase, which once belonged to his grandmother, was packed and shipped to Paris. It was set to go up for auction in a “Furniture and Works of Art” auction with 200 other items, none of which were worth more than €8,000.
Vase in “good condition”
The description in the auction catalog was unspectacular: “Large vase of Tianqiuping porcelain and polychrome enamel in blue and white style with spherical body and long cylindrical neck, decorated with nine fierce dragons and clouds (mark under base)”. The vase measures 54 cm x 40 cm and is in “good condition”. One appraiser estimated its value at 1,500 to 2,000 euros, classifying the vase as a 20th century decorative piece.
Inspection with lamps and magnifying glasses
The first suspicion arose when the catalog went online and the pre-auction display was flooded 15 days before the auction by 300 to 400 interested buyers, according to the Guardian.
“They came with lamps and magnifying glasses to see the work. Obviously, they saw something,” he said. Auction house officials initially attributed the unexpected rush to the interest of the Chinese community in France.
War of wild bids
There were so many applications to participate in the online auction that it had to be stopped: “At that moment we realized that something had happened.” The maximum number of bidders has been reduced to 30, half in the auction room, the other half by telephone, each having to pay a deposit of 10,000 euros in order to participate in the auction.
At last Saturday’s auction in Fontainebleau, south of Paris, there was a savage bidding war, in which someone immediately raised the number to two million after a few hundred thousand steps. Even with five million, ten potential buyers would still have competed, Osenat said. The hammer finally dropped by 7.7 million euros. The anonymous buyer, who bid by phone from China, had to pay €9.12 million in fees.
Seal assumed by the legendary emperor
In addition to the dragon and cloud vase, a coveted motif among East Asian collectors, a seal of Qianlong, an 18th-century Chinese emperor, is also believed to have been discovered by some of the bidders. The Qianlong reign is considered the culmination of the Qing Dynasty and is now seen as one of the “Golden Ages” of Chinese civilization.
“Traumatized” Salesperson
The former owner of the play reacted in a surprising way: Osenat said the amount was difficult for her to handle. She was “terribly afraid of the press” and was “quite traumatized” by it. “The vase had been in her family for generations. She said they always put flowers inside. She’s lived with it for 30 years and never imagined it would be worth this much,” he said. “She’s totally insecure. If it had been sold for €150,000 it would have been something, but €7.7 million is something completely different.”
terminated appraiser
The story did not have a happy ending for the appraiser who set the price. “The expert thought it was a 20th century copy, a decoration,” Osenat said. But one person alone against 300 interested Chinese buyers cannot be right. “He worked for us. He doesn’t work for us anymore,” Osenat said. According to reports, the appraiser is still adhering to his appraisal.
According to the Guardian, Cedric Laborde, the auction house’s head of Asian art, is still not entirely convinced that the expert was wrong. “We don’t know if it’s old or not and why it was sold at that price. We may never know,” said Laborde. In recent years there have been some surprises in Asian object auctions.