An antiques dealer who sold a rare African mask for $4.6 million won a legal battle with the elderly couple who sold it to him for $165 without realizing the treasure’s actual worth.

They let the mask go for 150 euros (£130), but in March 2022 it was sold to an unidentified buyer at an auction in the southern city of Montpellier, fetching 4.2 million euros (£3.6million).

Popularly known as the "Krugier-Picasso mask," a 19th century West African mask that will be part of the Jan Krugier Collection sale at Christie's on November 4 was an important inspiration to ...

The mask - which the auctioneers had initially valued at €300,000 - was bought for €4.2m by an unnamed bidder. The couple then launched a civil case to annul the sale.

The couple, in their eighties, sold the wooden mask in September 2021 as part of a number of antiquities including African artifacts they had kept in their secondary home in southern France and ...

Most expensive: “Probably these 40 wooden masks from Guadalajara [in Mexico]. I was working at the ceramics factory of a friend, José Noé Suro Salceda, whose brother had been killed years earlier.

The 19th-Century wooden mask was probably acquired "in unknown circumstances" around 1917 by René-Victor Edward Maurice Fournier, a French colonial governor and the plaintiff's grandfather.

Each dancer swings the mask in a figure 8, touching the ground with the top of the superstructure. Description Wood face mask with double cross superstructure, additional pieces at crossbar ends go up ...