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In the 41 years of wielding the gavel at his auction house a stone’s throw from the royal chateau at Fontainebleau, Jean-Pierre Osenat has never seen anything like it.
“This is a crazy story,” he said. “Quite extraordinary.”
The story has cost one of the auctioneer’s experts his job, after a Chinese vase he declared an ordinary decorative piece worth €2,000 (£1,750) at most sold for almost €8m, nearly 4,000 times the estimate.
“The expert made a mistake. One person alone against 300 interested Chinese buyers cannot be right,” Osenat said. “He was working for us. He no longer works for us. It was, after all, a serious mistake.”
The extraordinary story began earlier this year when a French woman and living abroad decided to sell furniture and various objects from her late mother’s home in Brittany. Having entrusted Osenat with the sale, the vase — which had belonged to her grandmother – was packed up, dispatched to Paris and put in a “furniture and works of art” auction of 200 lots, none of which was valued over €8,000.
Last Saturday, the vase, a Chinese tianqiuping – meaning “heavenly globe’” and denoting the round base and long neck – stood on a display table at the Osenat auction room. The catalogue described it as: Lot 36 “large tianqiuping porcelain and polychrome enamel vase in a blue-white style with globular body and long cylindrical neck, decorated with nine fierce dragons and clouds (mark under the base)”. The 54cm by 40cm vase was noted as being in “good condition”.
The estimated price, between €1,500 and €2,000, reflected the expert’s view that it was a 20th-century decorative piece and not a rare artefact.
