Garage sale-find Chinese bronze valued on US ‘Antiques Roadshow’ makes $1.7m at Sotheby’s auction

A Chinese gilt bronze figure bought at a garage sale and appraised on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow sold yesterday in New York for $1.7m (£1.3m) – around 21 times its upper estimate and more than 17,000 times its original purchase price.

Extracted from Antiques Trade Gazette | Frances Allitt

This gilt-bronze figure of Chinese Buddhist deity Chintamanicakra Avalokiteshvara from the late Tang Dynasty/Five Dynasties period sold for $2.1m (£1.6m) at Sotheby’s New York yesterday. It was bought at a garage sale for around $75-100 and had an upper estimate of £80,000.

The vendor had brought the piece to an Antiques Roadshow appraisal event in St Louis, where she said she had purchased the work at a garage sale around 20 years before for around $75-100. Sotheby’s said that the item was acquired from the estate of Trezevant Branam Winfrey (1912-1999) in Kirkwood, Missouri, in 1999.

It measured just over 6in (16.5cm) tall and was offered with an estimate of $60,000-80,000 at Sotheby’s auction of Important Chinese Art, part of Asia Week New York and was sold after a seven-minute bidding battle for the premium inclusive figure of $2.1m.

The late Tang Dynasty (618-907)/Five Dynasties (907-960) bronze depicts the Buddhist deity Cintamanicakra Avalokiteshvara or Guanyin. She holds her six arms in typical attitude with the wish-granting jewel (cintamani) in front of the chest and in its others the dharma wheel (chakra), the stem of a lotus, and a mala.

Guanyin or is among the best-known of the Buddhist deities in China, varying in form over time as different sutras were introduced. Cintamanicakra is often depicted in the present attitude. A related bronze figure is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.