150 euros instead of millions: in France, the court rejected the lawsuit of a couple who sold a rare mask for nothing
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A court has rejected a bid to overturn the sale of an extremely rare African mask that a couple from France sold for €150 before discovering it was actually worth millions.
As The Guardian reports, an elderly French couple from Aire-et-Loire, southwest of Paris, sold an African artifact to an antiquities dealer in September 2021.
The wooden mask that the couple kept in their home belonged to their ancestor, who was a colonial-era governor in Africa. The elderly couple believed that this artifact was of little value.
In March 2022, this African mask was sold to an unidentified buyer at an auction in Montpellier for €4.2 million. The auctioneers described it as “an extremely rare mask of the 19th century”, “property of the secret society of the Fang people in Gabon”. There are no more than 10 such artifacts in the world.
| Photo: Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty Images |
“This type of mask is even rarer than a painting by Leonardo da Vinci,” – said the representative of the auction house.
When this became known, the seller offered to pay the couple the initial bid of the auction – 300 thousand euros, but the children refused the couple. They immediately filed to cancel the initial sale, claiming an “authentication error.”
The couple also claimed that the buyer of the mask knew its real value.
However, the court dismissed the claim, saying the couple did not even try to evaluate the mask before selling it, calling it “negligent and reckless”. He also ruled that the antiquities dealer, who was not himself an expert on African art, had not deceived them.
The couple’s lawyer said his clients are “shocked” by the decision and want to appeal it.
The court also rejected a request by the Gabonese government to cancel the sale and return the mask to him. Members of the Gabon community attended the auction, where they protested against its sale and called for the artifact to be returned to them.
Earlier we wrote that a dealer who resold an African mask for 28,000 times more than he bought it is on trial in France.
Read also: In the USA, a woman bought a second-hand vase for $4 and resold it for over $100,000
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