In 41 years of swinging the gavel at his auction house a stone’s throw from the royal chateau at Fontainebleau, Jean-Pierre Ossena had never seen anything like it.
“It’s a crazy story,” he said. “Quite unusual.”
The story cost one of the auctioneer’s experts the job, after a Chinese vase he declared an ordinary decorative item worth €2,000 (£1,750) sold for almost €8 million, nearly 4,000 times the estimate.
“The expert made a mistake. Just one person against 300 interested Chinese buyers cannot be right,” Osenat said. “He was working for us. He no longer works for us. After all, it was a serious mistake.
The extraordinary story began earlier this year when a French woman living abroad decided to sell furniture and various items from her late mother’s home in Brittany. After entrusting the sale to Ossenat, the vase, which had belonged to her grandmother, was packed up, sent to Paris and auctioned for “furniture and works of art” in 200 lots, none of which was valued at more than €8,000.
Last Saturday, the vase, a Chinese tianqiuping – which means “celestial globe” and refers to the round base and long neck – sat on a display table in Osenat’s auction room. The catalog describes it as: Lot 36 “a large vase of tianqiuping porcelain and polychrome enamel in blue and white style with globular body and long cylindrical neck decorated with nine ferocious dragons and clouds (mark below base)”. Measuring 54cm by 40cm, the vase was noted to be in ‘good condition’.
The estimated price, between 1,500 and 2,000 euros, reflects the expert’s opinion that it is a 20th-century decoration and not a rare artefact.
Osenat said his suspicions that this might not be the case were raised when the catalog was online and the pre-auction exhibition was packed with 300 to 400 interested buyers 15 days before the sale.
“They came with lamps and magnifying glasses to see him. They obviously saw something,” he said. “There were so many registrations [to take part in the auction online] we had to stop them. At that point we knew something was up.
At first, auction house officials attributed the unexpected interest to the French Chinese community’s passion for Chinese art and history.
Faced with overwhelming interest, the auctioneers decided not to allow online bidding and the number of buyers was limited to 30 – half in the auction room, the other bidding by phone, each having to pay a deposit of €10,000 to participate.
The tianqiuping-style vase attracted hundreds of interested buyers at a pre-auction exhibition. Photo: Maison Osenat
Almost as soon as Lot 36 appeared, frantic bidding broke out. Osenat was conducting the sale in rapidly rising bids – €100,000, €200,000, €500,000 – when someone shouted “2m”. While bids reached €5 million, 10 buyers were still competing; with 7 million euros, only two remained.
When the gavel was finally brought down, to applause from the hall, the final bid reached €7.7 million. With the fees, the anonymous Chinese buyer will pay 9.12 million euros.
Osenat said of the seller, who moved abroad 15 years ago, the windfall comes with problems and the amount will be “difficult for them to come to terms with”.
“The vase has been in her family for generations. She said they put flowers in it. She had lived with it for 30 years and never imagined it was worth so much,” he said. “She is completely restless. If it sold for €150,000 that would be something, but €7.7 million is something else. She is terrified of being in the press and is quite traumatized by it.
The buyer is bidding by phone and lives in China. It is thought that in addition to the vase depicting the dragon and cloud, a sought-after motif among East Asian collectors, some may have spotted a seal of Qianlong, an 18th-century Chinese emperor who is a sacred figure.
The expert, who was fired and has not been named, reportedly stands by his original assessment.
Cédric Laborde, director of the auction house’s Asian art department, is still not entirely convinced that the expert was wrong. “We don’t know if [the vase] is it old or not or why is it being sold at such a price. We may never know,” Laborde said.
“The assessment was in line with what the expert thought. In China, copying something like an 18th century vase is also an art. In this case, I have no answer. There have been some surprises in Asian auctions over the past few years.
Ossenat, whose previous record sale was €4.8 million paid in 2007 for the sword carried by Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Marengo in 1800, said he had faith in the auctioneer’s hammer.
“The expert thought it was a 20th-century copy, a decoration, so we didn’t change the assessment. Eventually the market decided it was the 18th century,” he said. “I have confidence in the market. One expert said what he said… but the real price is what buyers decide.
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