Art expert at French auction house pays his job for wrong evaluation of rare vase

CAIRO – 10 October 2022: A French art expert has been kicked out of a prestigious auction house after he valued a Chinese vase 4,000 times less than its selling price, according to the British newspaper The Guardian.

The French news site Le Parisien said that collectors made a trip from China to France to see the blue and white decorative ceramic vase decorated with dragons and clouds. They are the coveted decorations of East Asian collectors. The auction house said the buyer's offer over the phone was from China.

Bidding at the well-known French auction house Ascent was fierce for the rare piece, but the appraiser lost his job due to the difference in price between what he estimated and what the buyers offered, which was estimated at four thousand times less.

"The expert made a mistake. One person alone for 300 interested Chinese buyers could not be right. He was working for us. He no longer works for us. It was, in the end, a huge mistake," auction house owner Jean-Pierre Osenat told the Guardian. 

The story of the vase’s sale began in Ossetia after a Brittany woman was disinfecting her mother's house and decided to sell the vase, which was once owned by her grandmother, according to the Guardian.

The expert who analyzed the piece thought the vase was just a decoration from the 20th century and decided it could not be worth more than $1950, but it eventually sold for €7.8 million.