Woman buys $4 thrift store vase, sells it for over $100,000 at auction
Jessica Vincent, who bought the rare item at a Goodwill, said: ‘I had a sense that it might be a $1,000 or $2,000 piece’
Sun 17 Dec 2023 22.14 CET
A woman who bought a glass vase for $3.99 at a local Goodwill charity shop has seen the piece auctioned off for more than $100,000 after it turned out to be a rare and valuable piece of Italian glassware.
Jessica Vincent had bought the item at a Goodwill thrift store in Hanover county, Virginia, and had an inkling that it might have been worth a little more than was usual, she told the New York Times.
“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 paper after noticing a small ‘M’ on its bottom which she suspected might stand for Murano, an Italian island near Venice famed for glasswork.
After snapping it up for a penny short of four bucks, Vincent researched the piece online where enthusiasts pointed out it resembled a work by famous Italian architect Carlo Scarpa.
Vincent eventually sent pictures of the vase to the Wright Auction House and almost immediately its president, Richard Wright, got in touch for a chat. “The minute I saw the photos I had a really good feeling,” Wright told the Times.
Last week it sold for $107,100 to an unidentified private art collector in Europe after it was officially identified as being part of Scarpa’s 1940s “Pennellate” series.