Virginia Woman Makes an Extremely Rare Find in Local Thrift Store

Jessica Vincent lives in Hanover County Virginia. Like many people, she loves bargain hunting and visiting secondhand shops, flea markets, garage sales, and the like.

I know a lot of people like this; they have never passed by a garage sale in their lives. I am definitely not one of them; in fact, I’m the exact opposite. I don’t even like having garage sales. Putting up the signs and dragging all the stuff out into the driveway is a pain. Besides, in most cases, I don’t want to get rid of half of the stuff, but under orders from my wife, I’m forced to part with things that I don’t need and haven’t used in a decade.

Anyway, Jessica decided to stop at a Goodwill store, something she does routinely on her way home from work, to see if anything caught her eye. While there, she spotted a striped vase and decided to check it out.

"It was so unusual. It had such quality. I knew it was a good piece of glass with the mark on the bottom," says Jessica.

The mark that she is referring to is the letter “M,” which meant nothing to her at the time but would soon mean much more than just being letter number 13 in the alphabet. Jessica liked the vase so much that she decided she would pay up to $10 for it, but she only ended up paying $3.99.

When she arrived at home, she immediately started researching its origins. The first thing she discovered was that the “M” stood for Murano, an island in Italy that is famous for its glass-making.

Jessica sought more information on Facebook from experts on Murano glass, and she was able to identify the piece. Shortly thereafter, she was receiving offers for tens of thousands of dollars for the vase.

In an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jessica related what she was hearing from the group on Facebook. "People in the group said these are extremely rare, top-shelf pieces. People only dream of owning these,” she recalled. "They said, 'I would die if I saw that out in the wild.' It gave me chills to see all those comments."

The vase was designed by Carlos Scarpa in the 1940s. Scarpa was a famous Italian architect and the former Venini Glassworks director. He was influenced by the materials, the landscape, and the history of Venetian culture. He was also fascinated with Japan. Scarpa translated his interests in history, regionalism, invention, and the techniques of the artist and craftsman into ingenious and beautiful glass and furniture designs. This particular vase was part of Scarpa’s Pennellate series.

Following the advice of her mentors on Facebook, Jessica reached out to Wright’s Auction House in New York. Upon learning about the vase, the auctioneer replied very quickly to Jessica, telling her, “These are so incredibly rare. This color and this form."

Richard Wright, the man who founded the auction house, told Artnet, "It's an amazing story, that this very sophisticated piece of glass finds its way to Virginia. It was expensive, not mass-produced, and it falls through the cracks all the way down to the Goodwill. It's not even chipped."

"This very charming woman who raises polo ponies finds it, and she isn't sure what she's found but she's smart enough to do her research. She finds the Italian glass group on Facebook and is smart enough not to sell it for the first offer she gets, of $10,000."

In its listing for the item, the auction house described the manner in which the vase was made:

"The technique itself, Pennellate meaning brushstroke, was achieved by adding colored opaque glass to the vase as it was being blown, and dragging the material around the circumference of the piece until the level of desired transparency was achieved."

Wright Auction House described the vessel as one of the rarest pieces the house has offered in a decade of auctions, and in fact, only one other vase with this exact color combination is known to exist, in what the house calls an established private collection. The vase was included in its “Important Italian Glass” sale, which also offered examples by designers including Ercole Barovier, Tomaso Buzzi, and Dino Martins.

The estimated value of the piece was thought to be somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000; however, the market thought much more highly of it. It eventually sold for $107,100, of which $83,500 went to Jessica while the house retained $23,600.

Summing up her adventure and good fortune, Jessica said, "You never know what you're going to find. It's the thrill of the hunt."

Merry Christmas, Jessica, and happy hunting in the new year.

Maybe I should rethink my stance on garage sales and secondhand stores.