Flea Market Gold
We all dream of it: finding a sweet little treasure at a flea market or tag sale, only to discover that its monetary value is far beyond what we paid.
Lightning struck two days in a row last week, at Bonhams in London. First, a pair of collectors scored a coup with a diminutive piece of 18th-century British porcelain they had bought on eBay for $200. As often happens on eBay, the seller didn’t know what s/he had, identified the tiny cream jug incorrectly as Italian, and the savvy collectors scooped it up for a song. Their find turned out to be not only one of the earliest pieces ever made by the Worcester porcelain factory (c. 1752), but a one-of-a-kind example to boot. Estimated to sell for $28,000 to $38,000, it inspired a bidding war that drove the final price to nearly $88,000. Not bad for a $200 outlay!
The following day, a picture bought at a New York flea market for less than $50 found a buyer for the astonishing sum of $283,000. The collector had never heard of the artist, Francis Newton Souza, and referred to his find, a portrait of a suited man against an orange background, simply as “the Chairman of the Board.” But as it turns out, Souza had been a founding member of India’s Progressive Artists Group, a cadre of artists who sought to find a new visual expression in the decades after independence. Long overlooked in the West, the Progressives are riding a spectacular market wave in the last few years, driven by a combination of India’s rising wealth, nationalism and cultural pride. Souza, who spent much of his career in London, saw critical, but not much financial, success during his lifetime, and his work has languished in flea markets and attics for decades. These days, the best examples—with his intense colors and bold black lines—are selling in the low to mid six figures. In fact, a few days after this sale, Sotheby’s earned a record $1.3 million for Souza’s 1953 Man with Monstrance, nearly twice its high estimate of $700,000.
