- There are only six of the bowls in the world, most in museums in none in the United States.
- The anonymous buyer paid the asking price of $35, then reached out to Sotheby's for an appraisal.
There are two kinds of people in this world; those who accidentally sell priceless artifacts at yard sales and those who recognize priceless objects amongst old records and a broken Furbys. Once, in a very great while, these two people meet, and someone makes half a million dollars. Spoiler: it’s not the person with a broken Furby.
Imagine seeing this news story after making $300 from your yard sale.
This time it happened in Connecticut, a state where you expect yard sales to contain priceless Chinese relicts. Here, it’s a white ceramic bowl with blue flowers. It’s hard to fault the person who sold it; the style is one that cheap manufacturers have knocked off for the past hundred years. There’s no quantitative test to prove the bowl is from the 1400s; it just takes a skilled eye–what are the chances one of those happened to drive past the yard sale that day?
The buyer, who paid the full asking price of $35 for the bowl, is remaining anonymous. However, the Chinese Works of Art Department at Sotheby’s spoke to the Associated Press to explain how they identify something worth $500,000.
“The style of painting, the shape of the bowl, even just the color of the blue is quite characteristic of that early, early 15th century period of porcelain,” said Angela McAteer, the president and head of the department.
It survived 600 years just to end up in a yard sale.
The bowl is from the early Ming period based upon the glaze’s silkiness, the distinctive designs, and the color. But again, it’s understandable that someone just assumed that it was a Homegoods tchotchke. The style came about under the third ruler of the Ming period, the Yongle court, when new porcelain kilns came onto the scene. The bowl is in the shape of either a lotus flower or a chicken heart. It seems like there should be an obvious difference between the two.
There are only six of these kinds of bowls in the world, most in museums and none in the United States. McAteer guessed the Connecticut family passed the bowl down through generations. At some point, the “priceless artifact” bit got forgotten. Then someone annoyed with Grandma’s clutter decided it was time to Marie Kondo the Ming relict into the yard.
Is scouring yard sales going to become affordable retirement planning?
As soon as the buyer got home, they emailed a picture to Sotheby’s. Apparently, a lot of people do this. It’s like the bourgeois version of heading to the next taping of Antiques Roadshow. But McAteer, who seems super-good at her job, could immediately tell that it wasn’t the typical email she gets, “It was immediately apparent to both of us that we were looking at something really very, very special.”
Here’s hoping that whoever paid $35 for the bowl will use the money to pay off the student loan debt they’re drowning under after getting a degree in art history.