She Paid $3.99 for a Goodwill Vase. It Sold for $107,100.

Jessica Vincent always trusted her eye for beautiful things. When she spotted a swirled glass vase at a Goodwill store in Hanover County, Virginia, she pulled it from the shelf and turned it over. The tag read $3.99. She had been ready to pay $8 or $9 for it.

A Signature That Changed Everything

Vincent noticed the word "Venini" etched into the base - a name she vaguely recognized. Back home, she posted photos to an Italian glass collecting Facebook group. The response came quickly: what she had was a Carlo Scarpa Pennellate vase, made in 1942 for the Venini glassworks on the island of Murano, off Venice. Scarpa - an Italian architect and designer - is considered one of the great figures of 20th-century Italian glass. The Pennellate series, whose name means "brushstrokes" in Italian, was made by adding swirls of colored opaque glass to the vase as it was blown, mimicking the marks of a painter's brush. The vase's sea-foam green and burgundy color combination was exceptionally rare: only one other example in that exact palette is known to exist, held in a private collection.

What the Experts Said

Members of the Facebook group directed Vincent to Wright auction house in Chicago, specialists in Italian mid-century design. Wright's president, Richard Wright, estimated the piece at $30,000 to $50,000 - already an astonishing figure for a $3.99 find. He described Scarpa as "really one of the preeminent, most famous glass designers of Italian glass in the midcentury" and called the vase one of the rarest pieces the house had handled in a decade of auctions.

The Auction

On December 13, 2023, the Pennellate vase went to auction at Wright. Bidders pushed the hammer price to $85,000 - well above the high estimate of $50,000 - and with buyer's premium the final sale price landed at $107,100. The buyer was a private European collector. Vincent, who had bought the piece thinking it would look beautiful in her 1930s Virginia farmhouse, said afterward: "My little farmhouse is not the right showcase for something so spectacular."

One in Twenty-Seven Thousand

The sale made headlines worldwide. The $107,100 final price is more than 26,800 times what Vincent paid for the vase at Goodwill. It is a reminder that great works of design move through the world in unexpected ways - from Venini's furnaces on Murano to a Goodwill shelf in Hanover County, Virginia, and finally to a private collector on the other side of the Atlantic.