Vase Bought For Just $4 Auctioned Off For An Impressive Sum
A glass vase bought for $3.99 at a local Goodwill charity shop has seen the piece auctioned off for more than $100,000.
"I had a sense that it might be a $1,000 or $2,000 piece", Jessica Vincent said, amazed by the luck she had with the item she bought.
Photo: The glass vase belonging to Jessica Vincent (Source: Twitter (X) - @JennyHaines19)
The simple, colored glass vase she bought turned out to be a rare and valuable piece of Italian glassware.
The simple, colored glass vase she bought turned out to be a rare and valuable piece of Italian glassware.
A Glass Vase That Was Not What it Seemed To Be
After buying the vase at a thrift store in Hanover, Virginia, Jessica Vincent had a hunch that the object might be worth a little more than the price she found it at, but she never thought it could be worth $100,000.
“I had a sense that it might be a $1,000 or $2,000 piece, but I had no clue how good it actually was until I did a little bit more research,” she told The New York Times.
The vase was inscribed with the initials M and she suspected that it might stand for Murano, an Italian island near Venice famed for glasswork.
On an antiquities website, amateurs told the woman that it appeared to be a work by the famous Italian artist Carlo Scarpa.
After finding this out, Vincent sent pictures of the vase to the Wright Auction House and almost immediately its president, Richard Wright, got in touch for a discussion.
“The minute I saw the photos I had a really good feeling,” Wright told the Times.
And he was right with his good feeling.
Last week the object bought for less than $4 was sold for $107,100 to an unidentified private art collector in Europe after it was officially labeled as being part of Scarpa’s 1940s “Pennellate” series.