A rare Buddha statue, estimated to be from 12th century China and part of a set thought to have been lost, will be presented for auction in Paris on Tuesday, June 13, and is expected to fetch USD 1,000,000.
According to auction house Bonhams, the piece is a very rare wood figure of the Guanyin Bodhisattva. At a height of over a meter, it was last sold in the 1930s to a family living in the suburbs of Paris who wishes to remain unknown.
The statue is a truly rare find, especially considering the material it is made from.
“It’s very rare because there are not many pieces like this surviving and the ones that do survive from this period are in museums. It’s made of wood, wood is very fragile. Wood over time can disintegrate,” explained Caroline Schulten, head of Chinese art at Bonhams. She added that the statue “came out of China during a period of time when China was in turmoil, and many of these wood figures were destroyed at the time already, some were sold and this is one of the few that has survived.”
The statue in question also bore some damage.
“So when it was sold, it was already in the state it is in. What has happened since then [when it was last sold] is that it has lost the fingers of the right hand, […] because they were clearly there when it was sold in 1932,” said Schulten.
But the damage was not caused by the instability that rocked China in the first half of the 20th century.
“I was told there were children playing football around it, so things happen, quite clearly,” Schulten added.
It might seem shocking that such a valuable artifact would be damaged by kids kicking a ball around it, but as Schulten says, the family was not aware of its value until they called Bonhams up for an estimate.
“I think they knew it was something that had been treasured at home, so it had been with the grandfather who died very early on, with the grandmother, who then remarried,” Schulten said. “And then it was passed down in the family to the present generation, and it had been sitting in a private home.”
Bonham auction house says there are likely only a handful of its kind left in the world, most of which are in museums.
“This is one of the few that has survived, so it’s quite possible that there are more pieces from this group that are still around in France or maybe in Belgium or Switzerland. And it’s quite exciting to think that maybe the sale of this figure or the publicity around it will generate more people looking at home and realizing that actually we’ve got a figure like that,” said Schulten.
So if you want the kids to stop playing ball in the garden, tell them that the gnome installed in it by grandpa is a valuable piece of East Asian art, and you will start deducting USD 1,000,000 from their allowance if they damage it.
