Sotheby's Sells Islamic Glass Vessel

Scott Reyburn of Bloomberg is reporting that Sotheby's just sold an Islamic Glass vessel for $2.3 million. This is 20 times the price it sold at Christie's in December of 2000. The vessel, featured in the Arts of the Islamic World sale on April 1, had an estimate of about $860,000.00 to $1.146 million. The complete sale totaled over $6.7 million. The interesting aspect of the Islamic glass vessel is when previously sold, it was thought to have been a fake. The piece is now documented as authentic, showing how scholarship can change in a rather short period of time.

Reyburn reports A medieval Islamic glass vessel sold in London today for 1.6 million pounds ($2.3 million), more than 20 times as much as it fetched less than a decade ago, when it was dismissed as a fake.

The 8-inch-high “Rothschild Bucket” was offered in Sotheby’s “Arts of the Islamic World” sale as a mid-14th-century piece. It was bought by an unidentified telephone bidder for double its top estimate, said the auction house. The price included saleroom fees.

The colorfully enameled vessel fetched 75,250 pounds with fees at Christie’s International’s December 2000 sale in London of the collection of the late Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild.

The bucket was then declared a modern fake by the late 19th-century scholar G. Schmoranz, said the Christie’s catalog, which gave it an estimate of 6,000 pounds to 8,000 pounds.

“Since then it has been reassessed by third-party experts,” said Edward Gibbs, specialist in charge of Sotheby’s sale. “The piece has now been fully rehabilitated by the scholarly and scientific community.”

To read the Bloomberg article, click HERE.