She Bought a Vase at Goodwill for $3.99. It Could Be Worth $50,000
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
One afternoon this June, Brookneal, Virginia, resident Jessica Vincent decided to kill some time with one of her favorite pursuits: a pit stop at the local thrift store.
“I have always been an avid collector, thrifter, yard sale-er,” she says. “I just love anything that has a history.”
When Vincent swung open the door to her area Goodwill, however, she was annoyed to find the aisles teeming with shoppers. But a 13-and-a-half-inch-tall vase, gleaming from a cluttered shelf, caught her eye. “There were quite a bit of people milling around in that area. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll just wait,’ ” she remembers.
Coast clear, Vincent circled back to inspect the vessel, which featured swirling ribbons of burgundy and mint green. “I saw that it was a solid piece of glass and that it was heavy, not junk,” she says. She turned it over, and the store’s fluorescent light danced across a faint, etched word: Murano. “It didn’t have a tag on it, but I decided I was going to buy it.”
She marched up to the cash register. The asking price? $3.99.
Vincent knew she had scored a bargain. What she didn’t know was that she had an ultra-rare masterwork of Italian glass in her possession. The vase is a 1940s design by influential Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, part of the “Pennellate” (Italian for “brushstrokes”) series he designed for Venini, a century-old glass workshop on the isle of Murano. On December 13, Vincent’s Goodwill find will hit the auction block in New York City at Wright auction house. It is expected to fetch between $30,000 and $50,000—quite possibly more.
“Never in 35 years have we had a piece like this in our hands,” says Sara Blumberg, Wright’s glass specialist. “Which is really kind of an amazing thing to say, because, as curators of the sales, we have handled thousands of pieces of glass”
Scarpa is best known for his playful-yet-rigorous buildings and interiors, which include the Castelvecchio museum in Verona, Italy, and an interior for an Olivetti typewriter store in Venice. But, at the age of 21, Scarpa also began experimenting with glass. In 1932, he was invited to collaborate with Venini, where he served as the design director until 1946.
“He made series after series in his brief tenure there,” Blumberg says. “It’s experimental, beautiful, and conceptually very advanced glass. What really makes [this vase] so rare is that so few of these were produced.”
It also makes Vincent’s Goodwill discovery particularly astonishing. After purchasing the vase, she posted a photo of it to a Murano glass Facebook forum. “I remember one guy private-messaged me—I think he was in Italy—and he offered me $10,000,” she says. “And I knew then that, wow, this must have some value.”
Vincent emailed a photo to Richard Wright, the founder of Wright auction house, who promptly forwarded it to Blumberg and fellow glass expert Jim Oliveira. Says Blumberg: “We did what we always do when we find out about something like this—we hopped in the car and drove to Virginia.”
The pair, miraculously, was able to confirm the vase’s authenticity. “I can count on one hand the times this has happened over the years,” Blumberg says. “This is really a very, very rare occurrence—particularly at a Goodwill.”
The vase is just one of 33 lots featured in Wright’s Important Italian Glass sale, which includes rarities by Gio Ponti and Ercole Barovier (including a 1969 decanter for Dior) as well as more Scarpa pieces. But Vincent’s vessel remains a connoisseur’s choice, and private collectors have already expressed interest, Blumberg says. Bids for the Pennellate vase will start at $24,000.
For Vincent, who raises and trains polo horses with her partner, Naza, the timing could not have been more serendipitous. “I had recently purchased a very old farmhouse, and it needs pretty much everything,” she explains. “While I love the piece and I will never, ever have my hands on anything that special again, the money is going to help me so much. I just feel like it’s the universe conspiring to help me along.”
Blumberg gives Vincent more credit: “You have to know how to see things out of context. It’s so easy to go to a museum and peer into a case and say, ‘god, that’s a great example.’ But to see something on a dusty shelf and understand it is a leap of faith. You have to be able to look with wide eyes to see these things. And happily, there are people who do—and she’s one of them.”
You Might Also Like
