In the art market, anything is possible. You can just as easily unearth masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance in the Australian bush as you can stumble upon an unknown treasure while scouring garage sales. The latter hypothesis obviously presupposes being either extremely lucky or a connoisseur – and preferably both. Finding an original armchair by the Irish designer Eileen Gray (1878-1976), a legend of the Art Deco movement whose creations are still produced (and widely copied), would be a great feat: in 2009, one of them reached the sum of 25 million euros (including fees) at auction, an unmatched record for a 20th-century piece of furniture.
However, if you have the bad taste to find a whole series of them, the gates of hell will close on you before you have time to say: “Too good to be true.”
The bric-a-brac of Mézilles, a village in the Yonne, has been held every year in August since 1976. It was in this joyful display of disparate objects that Jean-Claude Libourel spotted an intriguing set of six armchairs in 1997. Their wooden frame is lacquered in silver, highlighted with blue and coral red. A composite style, described by a specialist as being both “vaguely Asian and Western, with a hint of Egyptomania”.
The backrest is carved with a mermaid holding a seahorse. The six armchairs are not exactly identical. One of the mermaids has blond hair, others display cascades of blue curls. They appear old: one mermaid has lost her tail, the patinated cloud pattern has faded and in places you can see the primer paint under the layer of lacquer. Questioned by Libération a few years later, their buyer said he paid 17,500 francs (around 2,650 euros at the time), “without knowing their importance”.
The mermaid and the…
- Slate.fr
