The Joys (and Sorrows) of Finding Those Hidden Gems

I felt like such a fool. We were pressed for time, though, if that's any kind of excuse. And, of course, a good deal of greed played into it. Even as I paid the thrift store attendant a few hundred dollars for what I suspected was a drawing I could resell for thousands, I had pangs of guilt. "Should I come back and pay him more if this turns out to be what I think it is?" I thought. "Nah..." said the mini-me with horns and a pitchfork over my left shoulder. "You spotted it...you deserve to profit from it."

Long story short, I was wrong. It was by the artist I thought it was, but it wasn't worth thousands, and, as it turned out, I had no reason at all to feel guilty about what I paid. But in the end, just the thrill of thinking I had found some hidden gem was worth the price...like uncovering the Pollock at the garage sale, or the old story of the 11th-century rock crystal ewer mis-categorized (and mis-priced) at auction...or the Rembrandt under the...huh? er, back up...that what? you might ask. Here's the story, via artinfo.com:

A rare 11th century rock crystal ewer, misidentified as a 19th Century French claret jug, has sold for 220,000 pounds at auction, more than one thousand times its pre-sale estimate, the Art Newspaper said on Monday.

Experts believe the artefact's real value could be nearer five million pounds, according to the report.

The ewer was sold last Thursday at an auction held by Lawrences Auctioneers of Crewkerne, Somerset.

Lot 424 is catalogued as: "A French claret jug: The rock crystal body carved with animals, the silver gilt mounts with enamelled decoration, 19th century, 30 cm. (cracked and damaged). In fitted box of Morel a Sevres. 100-200 pounds".

But experts believe it is a rock crystal ewer from the Fatimid dynasty which ruled parts of northern Africa and the Middle East in the 10th-12th centuries.

Only five examples were previously known to have existed.

OK, so someone should have suspected something was up when an object valued at 100 to 200 pounds broke the 100,000 pound mark, surely. The report quoted above, in the British Newspaper, The Mirror, notes that the story broke in The Art Newspaper, but

The Art Newspaper did not say who had valued the ewer at up to five million pounds,

More pressing to me is who at the auction house valued it at only 100-200 pounds? But I guess even the dealers in this area are not all that familiar with these objects:

One dealer, who described the crystal ewer as a "Holy Grail" of Islamic art, recounted how he had looked at the item but failed to identify the ewer from the auctioneer's online catalogue.

There are fabulous stories associated with these objects, by the way:

Al Maqrizi, the Egyptian writer who chronicled the history of the Ismaili Fatimid Caliphate in the early 15th century, recorded eye witness reports of a large number of rock crystal artefacts in the Fatimid royal treasury in Cairo which was looted by mutinous troops in 1067-68. However, under Saladin, the Sunni Ayyubid ruler who conquered Egypt and succeeded the Fatimid Caliphs in 1171, a wave of iconoclasm saw these beautiful objects with their animal motifs destroyed en masse, thus ensuring their great rarity.

The ewers and other vessels which did survive were thought to have been carried back to Europe from the Holy Land by crusaders and ended up being used as reliquaries in churches.

But my favorite part of the story...because it's early, I'm uncaffienated, and I'm simply mean that way...was this tidbit:

Art Newspaper said that apart from the ewer bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the others remain in ecclesiastical collections. Another was dropped by an employee of the Museo degli Argenti in Florence in 1998 and shattered irreparably.

The only person less happy than that Florentine museum employee must be the Somerset auction house appraiser, I'd wager.