A French couple who sold an “extremely rare” African mask for €150 only to discover it was worth millions have had a request to cancel the artefact’s sale thrown out in court.
The couple, in their 80s, sold the wooden mask in September 2021 to a secondhand goods dealer as part of the sale of a number of antiquities including African artefacts that they had kept in their secondary home in southern France.
The objects had belonged to an ancestor who was a colonial-era governor in Africa, and they believed they were of little value.
The couple, who live in Eure-et-Loir, south-west of Paris, sold the mask for €150 but in March 2022 it was sold to an unidentified buyer at an auction in the southern city of Montpellier for €4.2m.
The auctioneers described it as “an extremely rare 19th-century mask, property of a secret society of the Fang people in Gabon”, an ethnic Bantu group, with only about 10 such objects still in existence. One auction house official told French TV: “This type of mask is even rarer than a Leonardo da Vinci painting.”
The couple promptly filed for an injunction to cancel the original sale, arguing there had been an “authentication error”. They also claimed that the mask’s buyer was aware of its real value at the time of the purchase.
But the court rejected the request, saying the couple had failed to make any attempt to get the mask valued before selling.
Their claim was characterised by “inexcusable negligence and frivolity”, the court said, ruling that they were not owed any money.
It also ruled that the antiquities dealer, who himself was no expert on African art, did not cheat them.
The dealer actually offered to pay them €300,000, the auction starting price, but the couple’s children refused, preferring to take the matter to court.
The couple’s lawyer, Frédéric Mansat Jaffré, said after the verdict that his clients were “dumbstruck” by the decision and were considering an appeal.
The court also threw out a separate motion by the government of Gabon to have the sale cancelled and the mask returned.
Members of the Gabon community in southern France attended the auction in protest, saying the mask should never have been put up for sale in the first place and must be returned to the central African country.
Earlier this year, Solange Bizeau, of the Collectif Gabon Occitanie, who had protested against the auction with other members of the Gabon community, told the Guardian: “Today this court case is about the grandchildren of the governor versus a secondhand dealer. But neither of them is legitimate in terms of this mask. What we want is the restitution of this mask to Gabon.
“This mask has a soul, it was used to establish justice in our villages. The discussion in court has been about morality, but what about the morality of the spoliation of works of art and our dignity? Where is the morality in that?”
