An incredible deal. As revealed by our colleagues at Parisian, a retired couple from Eure-et-Loire, aged 88 and 81 respectively, decided in September 2021 to empty his second home located in the Gard department, using a second-hand dealer. Among the items sold, a carved wooden mask, inheritance from an ancestor who was a colonial governor in Africa, was sold for 150 euros. They were far from imagining the true value of this treasure. A few months after the sale, the couple came across an announcement regarding the sale of a “extremely rare mask from the 19th century” of the Fang people in Gabon, in a newspaper. Their surprise was complete when they recognized, thanks to a photo, their old mask, the beauty of which inspired emblematic artists such as Modigliani or Picasso. So, its price was infinitely higher that the amount they received…
Deep artistic and colonial origins
Obviously, the second-hand dealer knew the value of the mask well, since the sales catalog indicated that it had been “collected around 1917, under unknown circumstances, by the French colonial governor René-Victor Edward Maurice Fournier (1873-1931)”. Despite indoor protests demanding the “restitution” masks in Gabon, it was sold for 4.2 million eurosexcluding costs, on March 26, 2022. Frédéric Mansat Jaffré, the couple’s lawyer, told AFP: “You have to show a little good faith and honesty. My customers would never have sold this mask at this price if they had known that it was an extremely rare piece”. Faced with this situation, the second-hand dealer offered 300,000 euros to retirees, but as their lawyer mentioned to AFP, they “have never seen the check”. The case, which will be judged on October 31, 2023 at the Alès judicial court, awaits a decision by the end of the year. Pending the verdict, the second-hand dealer’s accounts remain frozen by decision of the Nîmes Court of Appeal.