Rare jade collection to be auctioned at A.H. Wilkens in Toronto
Posted Nov 23, 2014 09:00:03 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – A rare collection of ancient Chinese jade pieces, some dating back 6,000 years, will be up for grabs in Toronto on Tuesday and are expected to “well exceed” their collective pre-sale estimate of $500,000, says A.H. Wilkens Auctions & Appraisals.
“We really don’t see pieces of this nature come up very often any longer,” said Andrea Zeifman, COO and senior appraiser at A.H. Wilkens, noting such a collection is usually held in a museum.
“It’s a pretty esoteric collection because it’s so old.”
The nearly 200-piece collection comes from the estate of the late Irving Langleb, a Brooklyn-born linguistics scholar who moved to Japan after working in Asia during the Second World War. He became a businessman in Japan and started collecting jade pieces that were being exported along with many antiques out of China due to excavation of gravesites amid industrialization and agricultural growth.
Around 1967, Langleb and his wife moved to Hong Kong and then settled in Israel, where his collection has been held in storage.
The collection includes pieces from the Neolithic period and Archaistic jade from the Shang and Han dynasties. Zeifman said many of them were part of burial rituals and in tombs thousands of years ago.
Highlights include symbolic cong tubes from the Liangzhu culture and a collection of burial pigs, which were placed into the hands of the dead as a sign of wealth and prosperity in the afterlife.
Zeifman said that in recent years she got to know the four sons of Langleb, who died about 20 years ago, and went to Israel to see the jade collection in the summer. When the family decided to sell the pieces, they went with Toronto “because there is such a strong and affluent community within Canada of Chinese people.”
“What I find really interesting is that they did have faith to be able to sell the collection in Toronto,” she said. “I think that really shows the strength of the Canadian market within the context of the international Chinese market. We’ve been seeing strong growth within Canada in Chinese antiques.”
The market for Chinese antiques is “astronomical” overall right now and there’s been “tons” of advance interest in the Langleb collection, added Zeifman.
Tuesday’s live and online Asian Arts Auction, which is set for 7 p.m. ET, has about 400 lots in total. Each piece in the jade collection will be sold as an individual lot.
