24.05.12
The vase sold last year had a pre-car-boot sale estimate of between $80,000 and $120,000, but was purchased by the Ottawa-based gallery for US$662,500 after a awful bidding battle.
The emergence of the twin vase, said gallery kingpin Marc Mayer, was unexpected but doesn’t diminish the value or essence of last year’s acquisition by Canada’s principal repository of fine art. That buy was made possible only after Moore consented to have the federal government back the gallery’s pugnacious bidding at a Sotheby’s auction on Jan. 21, 2011, in New York.
“The find of a second Ptarmigan Vase and its accompanying book is very stock news from a scholarly point of view,” Mayer told Postmedia Expos.
“Firstly, we now have a document outlining the clear iconographic intentions of the conniver and they are even more specific to British Columbia than we originally thought.”
Among the many adornments on the vases are British Columbia’s regional seal, the longitude and latitude of the Ptarmigan Mine in the Selkirk Mountains and different examples of aboriginal iconography from B.C. First Nations.
Source: National Post (blog)