An 18th-century Chinese vase that spent the last 50 years in a home filled with pets just sold for $9 million
- A Chinese vase that was created for an 18th-century emperor was rediscovered after spending 50 years in an elderly woman's country home in Europe.
- The woman had multiple dogs and cats who "walked around freely," said Amsterdam-based art consultant Johan Bosch van Rosenthal, who saw the vase at the home.
- The vase was purchased for just $56 in 1954, but it sold at a Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong on Saturday for more than $9 million.
- "It is a miracle that this extraordinarily fragile vase survived half a century in a home surrounded by countless pets," said Nicolas Chow, chairman of Sotheby's Asia, in a statement.
A Chinese vase that once sold for $56 was auctioned off on Saturday for $9,084,486 — after it was rediscovered in an elderly woman's pet-filled home.
Sotheby's described the vase as a "lost masterpiece" and a "technical tour-de-force" that was originally made for China's Qianlong Emperor in the mid-18th century.
According to Sotheby's, the vase was rediscovered by Johan Bosch van Rosenthal, an Amsterdam-based art consultant, who was called to an unidentified woman's home to assess her art collection in 2019. Sotheby's would only identify its location as central Europe.
In a video posted on the auction house's YouTube channel, van Rosenthal described the moment he first saw the dust-covered vase in the woman's house: "We reached a room with a number of Chinese works of art inherited many years ago. Her four cats walked around freely among these. She pointed out a ... partly gilded Chinese vase on a cupboard — a cherished object which she knew to be something special and valuable."
Van Rosenthal said that while he is "not a specialist in Chinese works of art" he noticed that it was "no ordinary Chinese vase." He sent photos of the vase to Nicholas Chow, the chairman of Sotheby's Asia.
Chow then visited the woman's home and confirmed that the vase was highly valuable. Experts at Sotheby's were able to find a matching record for the vase in the Chinese Imperial household archives and said that it was once displayed in the Palace of Celestial Purity in Beijing's Forbidden City.
Records also showed that the vase was previously sold at a Sotheby's auction in 1954 for $56 (about $530 in today's dollars, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics) and again later that year for $101. It is known as the Harry Garner Reticulated Vase for the man who owned it prior to its 1954 auction.
The vase was sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong Chinese Works of Art Spring 2020 Sales Series alongside another big-ticket item, a recessed-leg table from the Ming Dynasty, that went for $7,761,800.
The Harry Garner Reticulated Vase is the third Chinese vase to be sold for millions in the past decade. In 2010, another vase from the same time period sold for $68 million. In 2018, a vase found in a shoebox in an attic in France sold for $19 million.