VASE ONCE KEPT IN MUSEUM’S STORAGE SELLS FOR $14.5M

A centuries-old Chinese vase that was once in storage at an Oklahoma museum has sold at auction for $14.5 million in Hong Kong. The rare porcelain vase was given to the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa in 1960. It was part of the museum’s permanent collection, though it was kept in storage for more than a decade. Known as a tianquiping, or celestial sphere vase, it is believed to have been commissioned in the early 1700s by Emperor Qianlong. In the 1920s oil executive George Taber Jr. acquired it, and years later his daughter donated it to the Philbrook. “It was really an anomaly. It didn’t fit into anything we had here; it was really hard to tell a story around it,” Scott Stulen, director and president of the museum, told Tulsa World news. The vase had been estimated at $9 million to $11 million ahead of Wednesday’s auction.