Is my judgment failing me?

[zanilu]

Hello to all,

I have been following this auction on Yahoo (https://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/1098488866)

 

 

and I was quite baffled by the final price, 290000 JPY.

I mean considering the conditions, the lack of papers, the quality of the decoration design that is not Heianjo zogan at its best, the missing inlay and the quality of the execution I would have guessed a price below half of the final hammer price obtained by this auction.

What am I missing? Are my eyes failing me? Do I have to question my judgment?

 

I do not want to offend anyone in case the winner of the bid is reading this post!
I am just curious.

 

@Brian if this post is inappropriate please remove it.

 

Regards
Luca

[b.hennick]

It seems expensive for a tsuba that has so many missing inlays of brass. I would expect far better condition for that price. To me there is far too much going on and even if it had all its original inlay I would pass on it.

[Spartancrest]

You might be missing the main point - two [or more] people getting carried away with "Winning".

I agree with you it is not the best quality and you can easily find much more interesting examples for far less money. 

one end of the scale https://www.jauce.com/auction/g1099655784 or  https://buyee.jp/ite.../auction/g1099655784 

to the other https://www.jauce.com/auction/b310919754 or https://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/b310919754 with papers.

 

[GRC]

Your judgement seems sound to me Luca 

I'm shocked that it hit that price because Heianjo don't typically get anywhere near that price on YJ. 

 

I remember seeing one or two, in nearly perfect condition, starting at a third of that price, and they just lingered for what seemed like months, with no one bidding on them.

I think the sellers just gave up trying at some point and stopped relisting them.

 

Looking at the bid history, I see it was a foreigner who won it, but the next two in line were Japanese.

Third on the list was 74,100yen... which seems high as well for a Heianjo with so many issues, but at least it's within a "reasonable range".

 

 

I can't even begin to imagine what would have motivated the top two bidders to go that far with it...

Even the pure motivation to "win" (as Dale suggested) has limits for most people... 

[rkg]

Luca,

I would think it would be binned as heianjou zougan, but... could it be binned Washida work instead? (I think i've only ever seen one washida group piece in person in hand so I'm not the best to comment on that).

 

That said, its not a terrible piece - the inlayer put on a lot of inlay, it has a couple of different types of inlay metal, the amount of missing inlay appears to be below the 10% threshold that is considered acceptable, and...  the surface is actually in pretty good shape, but yeah, the final price seems kind of er, enthusiastic compared to what other similar pieces have gone for on YJ in the past. 

 

But that has also been happening a lot lately on a surprising number of pieces coming through Yahoo!Japan of late for whatever reason - there's been a LOT of overly enthusiastic bidding on unpapered (when they "should" be), not in mint condition, etc machibori pieces for example.  And the winners are usually gaijin so take that for whatever its worth...  Overly enthusiastic bidding?  Lack of top end material out there being made available to buy?  some other reason?

 

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)

 

 

 

 

[zanilu]

Nice to hear that my judgment has not gone astray 

 

As said by Richard, the piece seems to me a little too busy and overdecorared and this to me does not match with a washida attribution to me. Also the execution of the kebory on the inlay does not reach the level of that found even on mid range Heianjo pieces I have in my collection. Without mentioning Washida...

I have one Washida papered piece, one non papered but almost certainly washida and one probable and this piece is not even close to those.

 

As Dale said the final price could be due to bidding frenzy but that seems too much... I was bidding for the piece too but I had set myself a limit well below that.

 

Regards

Luca