Oregon Estate Sale Lawsuit Puts a Price on Chinese Scrolls — and Google Image Search
A family dispute in Oregon has turned into a test of how far estate-sale valuation can go when the objects in question are Chinese artworks that may be worth far more than they were tagged for. In a lawsuit filed Monday in Clackamas County Circuit Court, John E. Moody says Marble Road Estate Sales sold dozens of scrolls and rubbings from his late mother’s home near Lake Oswego for as little as $45 apiece after allegedly relying on Google Image Search to assess them.
Moody says the works were found in two chests, hidden beneath clothing and textiles, and were never listed in the estate inventory. According to the complaint, they were priced between $45 and $275 without his knowledge. He is now asking a judge to order the buyers to return the artworks, rather than seeking damages from the estate-sale company.
The lawsuit argues that several of the pieces may be by Xu Beihong, the Chinese modernist known for his energetic horse paintings and one of the country’s most closely watched auction names. One scroll depicting a galloping horse is believed to be by Xu, the complaint says. Works attributed to him have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, and his record stands at nearly $42 million. Data from ARTDAI reviewed by shows that Xu’s five most expensive works sold at auction have ranged from $3.9 million to $9.2 million.
Moody says the artworks were acquired by his late father, Robert Behymer Moody, while he served as a US diplomat in China during the 1940s. The complaint also alleges that some purchasers were knowledgeable collectors or dealers in Chinese art who quickly recognized the potential value of the scrolls and bought as many as they could.
One defendant, Changning “Charlie” Huang, told the Oregonian that he did not buy any of the disputed scrolls and questioned the family’s effort to unwind the sale. The case raises a familiar but uneasy question for estate sales: what happens when a hidden object is not merely overlooked, but misread?
That tension has surfaced before. In 2016, a Minnesota collector paid less than $50 for what the Smithsonian later reported was a long-lost Vincent van Gogh painting valued at roughly $15 million. Earlier this year, a Portland teenager bought a Wilt Chamberlain warm-up jacket for $3 at a Goodwill outlet before it resurfaced at Sotheby’s with a presale estimate of $150,000 to $250,000. In each case, the market’s romance with discovery collided with the problem of attribution.
