Chinese Ding ware | Wikimedia Commons
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection includes Northern Song Ding ware dating to the 11th and 12th centuries. The museum describes its own example as porcelain with an incised design beneath an ivory-white glaze and identifies it as Ding ware from China. The Met also makes images of many of its collection objects available for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use through its Open Access program.
A small white bowl was bought for $3 at a New York state garage sale in 2007, and sat in a family’s living room for years. In 2013, experts identified it as a rare Chinese Ding bowl from the Northern Song dynasty. Sotheby’s estimated it at $200,000 to $300,000, and at auction, a London dealer paid $2.225 million including commission. It came from a garage or tag sale where the buyers paid no more than $3. They took it home and kept it on display, and were apparently unaware that the plain-looking bowl dated to a period roughly 1,000 years earlier. On March 19, 2013, the bowl went under the hammer in New York as part of a Sotheby’s sale of Chinese ceramics and works of art, with the successful bidder being Giuseppe Eskenazi, a London dealer and specialist in Chinese art. The final price was $2.225 million including commission, according to contemporary reports.
The sale price was more than seven times Sotheby’s high estimate and hundreds of thousands of times what the family had paid for it at the garage sale.
