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Every day, unexpected objects arrive at Sotheby’s—having first been submitted via an online form, uploaded by someone who harbored suspicions about the antiques in their attic but wasn’t quite sure. Many people never make the first move, assuming an auction house is for someone else’s treasures, not theirs. But the Sotheby's submissions portal is one of the most accessible doors into the auction house—and a source of endless surprise for its specialists, who often delight at the wonders that may land in their inbox on any given Monday.
Need more proof? What follows are five recent arrivals that began as nothing more than a few photographs and a hunch—and went on to command extraordinary prices.
In January, a small carved oak cabinet made in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1677 sold for more than $1.6 million—the highest price for American furniture in over a decade. To an untrained eye it might read as a grungy old box; in fact it is one of only five known examples attributed to the celebrated Symonds shops, and the only one to survive with its original key. “I did not believe it was real when I saw it,” recalls Erik Gronning, a senior advisor in Sotheby’s American Furniture, Folk Art and Decorative Arts Department. “It wasn’t until I saw the last submitted image, of its original key, that I knew for certain it was a period piece and highly important.”
The cabinet’s carved door bears the initials of Symon and Rebeckah Horne, an Andover couple, flanking a small heart—“to symbolize their love,” Gronning says—above the date they had it made: 1677, the year their son was born. It had descended through the family for generations before a local historical society, which had quietly held it for some sixty years, decided to let it go.
Some objects arrive carrying the weight of millennia. A marble slab inscribed with an early version of the Ten Commandments—twenty lines of ancient Paleo-Hebrew script, in the Samaritan tradition—came to Sotheby’s and went on to sell for more than $5 million against a high estimate of $2 million. It was originally unearthed in what is now Israel during railway excavations in 1913. It then spent roughly three decades as a paving stone in a local home, its surface worn by footsteps before anyone recognized what it was.
Sharon Liberman Mintz, Sotheby’s International Senior Specialist for Judaica, recalls the moment it surfaced: “When the images first appeared on my screen, I knew immediately that I was encountering an object of immense historical value.” Fewer than ten such tablets are known, she notes, and all the others are more fragmentary—which is part of why she calls this the most significant archaeological object from the Land of Israel ever to come to market.
Not everything that comes through the portal is centuries old. A gilt-bronze armchair by the French designer Claude Lalanne—its frame wrapped in vines and monkeys cast in patinated bronze, its seat of ostrich leather—arrived as a submission and sold last December for well into six figures. According to Margaret Wood, a specialist in Sotheby’s Design Department, it is the earliest of Lalanne’s “Singerie” armchairs ever to come to auction, produced in 1998 and numbered one from an edition of one.
“Each [Lalanne] work is unique in some way,” Wood says, “ranging from the positioning of the monkeys to how the vines cast in gold patinated bronze swirl and wrap around the underlying chair form.” It came to market at a moment when demand for the Lalannes has rarely been higher—the same auction was led by a work that set a record for any design object at auction.
A vintage Rolex Daytona might not seem like a puzzle, but this one carried a small engraving on its caseback—a Swiss cross encircled by a knotted rope—that had mystified collectors for years. “When the watch first surfaced we knew instantly that it was something special,” says Geoff Hess, Sotheby’s Global Head of Watches. The engraving turned out to be the emblem of the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research, which commissioned a small number of these watches to commemorate an Everest expedition it organized in the early 1950s—groundwork for the famous ascent that followed. Fewer than a handful with the marking have ever been found. This example came from a founding member of the Foundation itself, making it the first with a direct tie to the organization the watches were made for. “Provenance,” as Hess puts it, “at its very best.”
When thousands of submissions arrive in a single category, telling the real from the fake is its own art. “Amidst the thousands of submissions we get for Chinese art—the vast majority of them fake—anything genuine is a needle in a haystack,” says Julian King, International Specialist in Chinese Works of Art. “This vase is pure gold.”
A ruby-ground porcelain bottle vase made for the Qianlong emperor in the 1740s, it displays the imperial court’s most exuberant taste: ruby enamel carved away to reveal a white lotus beneath, a technique perfected to satisfy an emperor famously hard to please. King recognized it on sight. The provenance sealed the deal: the vase had descended through the family of Dame Agnes Jekyll, a British artist born into a celebrated collecting dynasty—and turned up, of all places, illustrated in an estate agent’s brochure for the Cornish house where it had long sat. It sold for £304,800.
