Having a rough week? Take solace in the fact youโre not the art expert who was recently fired for wrongfully appraising a Chinese tianqiuping vase at โฌ2,000 ($3,000), only to watch it auction for over โฌ7.7 million ($12.25 million).
According to The Guardian, this entire saga began earlier this year when a French woman living abroad decided to sell furniture and various objects from her late motherโs home in Brittany. One of which was the Chinese tianqiuping vase in question (โtianqiupingโ meaning โheavenly globeโ).
Entrusting the hot ticket item to the auction house Osenat, an estimated price between โฌ1,500 and โฌ2,000 was set after the now-unemployed art expert mistook it for an โordinaryโ 20th-century decorative piece, and not the rare artefact it was.
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Of course, there were suspicions the initial assessment was inaccurate when the catalogue went online and the pre-auction exhibition attracted 400 interested buyers more than two weeks before it actually went under the hammer.
โThey came with lamps and magnifying glasses to look at it. Obviously they saw something,โ said Jean-Pierre Osenat himself.
โThere were so many registrations [to take part in the auction online] we had to stop them. At that point we understood something was happening.โ
At this point, however, Osenat simply chalked it up to the French-Chinese communityโs passion for Chinaโs art and history. The only safeguard they implemented was to prohibit online bids, limiting the buyers to 30. Each party was required to pay a โฌ10,000 ($15,000) deposit beforehand.
As you can imagine, what occurred next was nothing short of a proper frenzy. By the time bids crossed the โฌ5 million threshold, there were still 10 parties competing. By the time bids crossed the โฌ7 million threshold, only two remained.
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โThe vase had been in her family for generations,โ Osenat, the man, said of the Chinese tianqiuping vaseโs former owner.
โShe said they used to put flowers in it. She had lived with it for 30 years and never imagined it was worth that much.โ
โSheโs completely unsettled. If it had sold for โฌ150,000 that would have been something, but โฌ7.7 million is something else. Sheโs terrified of being in the press and quite traumatised by it.โ
Jean-Pierre Osenat added: โThe expert made a mistake. One person alone against 300 interested Chinese buyers cannot be rightโฆ He no longer works for us. It was, after all, a serious mistake.โ
