For more than a century, a luminous white-marble figure by Auguste Rodin rested unnoticed atop a family piano in central France. The owners, who believed it to be a harmless copy, invited auctioneer Aymeric Rouillac to appraise a completely different object—yet his eye was immediately drawn to the tiny, contorted form clasping its foot among framed photographs.
The sculpture, just eleven inches high, had vanished from public record in 1906. Carved around 1892-93, it belongs to Rodin’s most refined period, when he reworked dozens of figures from The Gates of Hell into independent masterpieces. Within seconds of examining the crisp chisel lines and the hand-incised “A. Rodin,” experts from the Comité Rodin pronounced the piece genuine.
Rouillac placed the rediscovered treasure in his annual “Garden Party” auction on 10 June 2025, where collectors sensed a once-in-a-generation opportunity: marbles by Rodin rarely leave museum walls, and posthumous bronzes vastly outnumber them in the market. After a tense twenty-minute bidding battle, the hammer fell at €1.1 million - about $1.2 million to a thirty-something banker from the U.S. West Coast, edging out rivals from China and Switzerland.
The price far outstripped the $797,500 achieved by a similar-scale Rodin marble in 1990, underscoring both the artist’s enduring appeal and the shrinking supply of top-tier works. Scholars, meanwhile, can now close a 119-year gap in the object’s provenance, tracing it back to the Parisian financier Alexandre Blanc before its long, quiet sojourn in a provincial home.
Stories like this remind us that museum-quality treasures still hide in plain sight - waiting, sometimes, on a piano—to rewrite art-historical narratives and energize the market.
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