The Chinese porcelain bowl from 1400. Image from Sotheby's auction houses in New York.AP
An antiques regular last year came across a piece that caught his eye at a yard sale in New Haven, Connecticut.
It was a small white porcelain bowl with flowers and figures painted in cobalt blue.
He bought it for $ 35 (28.9 euros).
The buyer, who sensed that it was something special, did not expect it to be a Chinese object from the 1400s valued between $ 300,000 and $ 500,000.
New York auction house Sotheby's will put the "rare and exceptional" Ming Dynasty vase on sale on March 17 as part of its featured collection of Chinese art at "Asia Week."
The buyer with the privileged nose for antiques remains anonymous.
After purchasing the approximately 16-centimeter-diameter piece, he emailed photos to Sotheby's asking for an evaluation of the object.
When Chinese art and ceramics auction house experts Angela McAteer and Hang Yin reviewed the images, they knew it was "very, very special."
They were not wrong.
The "lotus bowl", due to its shape of a lotus bud, turned out to be one of the seven of its kind that are known to exist in the world, according to Sotheby's, most of them exhibited in museums, such as the one in London or Taiwan
None in the United States.
"The style of the painting, the shape of the bowl, even the blue color, is quite characteristic of that period of porcelain in the early 15th century," explained McAteer, senior vice president of Sotheby's and director of its art department at China, to
The Guardian
.
Although there is no scientific evidence to confirm it, the trained eyes of the experts confirmed when they saw the bowl live that it was a piece from 1400, during the reign of the Yongle Emperor, the third of the lineage of the Ming dynasty, who ruled since 1403 to 1424, a period known for its distinctive and celebrated porcelain techniques.
"In all respects, this delicate bowl is a quintessential Yongle product, made for the court, displaying the striking combination of superb material and slightly exotic patterned paint that characterizes imperial porcelain from this period," describes the auction house.
McAteer described on CNN that the porcelain body is "incredibly smooth" with a "really unctuous silky glaze," something his research has never repeated in later reigns or dynasties.
Ming Dynasty ceramics are famous for their titanium white porcelain, one of the best white pigments used by artists in art history, and cobalt blue.
These pieces were frequently produced at the Jingdezhen factories in southern China, which for centuries supplied their delicate porcelains to the Ming and Qing emperors.
Between 1368 and 1644 there was a boom in the manufacture of ceramics.
The Yongle Emperor commissioned a wide range of objects for his court, exercising greater government control over the ovens in Jingdezhen.
Four smaller bowl designs are known from the period of the Yongle Emperor, two of them in the shape of a lotus bud.
All four examples are in the Palace Museum, Beijing.
The mystery of how such a unique oriental piece came to a garage in a city of less than 130,000 inhabitants has not yet been discovered and an answer is unlikely because there is little documentation.
Sotheby's experts, frustrated by not knowing with certainty how it ended up in Connecticut, assume that it passed from generation to generation in the same family, who did not know that among their decorative pots they had a Chinese object from the 15th century and that its value was up to 14,300 times more than what was put up at the garage sale.
