An Art Expert Appraised a Vase at $1,950. It Sold for $7.5 Million—So He Was Fired.
Talk about a bad day at the office. A French auction house fired one of its art experts after their appraisal of a vase massively missed the mark.
Last week, Osenat auctioned a Chinese tianquiping vase for more than 7.7 million euros ($7.5 million)—9.1 million euros ($8.8 million) after fees. The problem is that the art expert who appraised it for the French auction house expected it to fetch less than 2,000 euros ($1,940). After a bidding war ensued between Chinese buyers to drive up the price, the vase didn’t appear to be “quite ordinary” as the auction house had originally deemed it.
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The seller herself had no expectation of it being that valuable either. The French woman living abroad was selling items from her mother’s home in Brittany, France and entrusted the curio to Jean-Pierre Osenat’s auction house in addition to other various items. The porcelain blue and white vase decorated with clouds and nine dragons was originally purchased by the seller’s grandmother and then passed down, spending decades just holding flowers in the family home.
The expert believed the vase to be from the 20th century and didn’t single it out from the 200 other lots. But when Osenat listed the item online and showed it in an exhibition ahead of the auction, the house was flooded with potential buyers.
“They came with lamps and magnifying glasses to look at it. Obviously they saw something,” Osenat told The Guardian. “There were so many registrations [to take part in the auction online] we had to stop them. At that point we understood something was happening.”
Unlike the appraiser, potential buyers believed this vase to be a rare artifact dating back to the 18th century, which bore a stamp of Qianlong, who was a former Chinese emperor and a sacred figure.
More than 300 people registered their interest and that group was culled to 30 serious bidders ahead of the auction. The bids were placed over the phone with a deposit of 10,000 euros ($9,704). As the sale drew to a close, the calls became more frantic. In the end, the item sold for almost 4,000 times the original estimate, going to an unnamed buyer in China.
“The expert made a mistake. One person alone against 300 interested Chinese buyers cannot be right. He was working for us,” Osenat told The Guardian. “He no longer works for us. It was, after all, a serious mistake.”
However, not even the director of the auction house’s Asian arts department is completely convinced the expert was wrong. Cédric Laborde says it may have been artfully crafted copy. “We don’t know whether it is old or not or why it sold for such a price,” Laborde said. “Perhaps we will never know.”
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