Guimiot found this three-foot-tall Jörai crouching funerary figure (est. €80,000-120,000; $106-159,000) in 1975 in a burial enclosure on the outskirts of a village in the central highlands of war-torn Vietnam, to which he had traveled by military plane from Saigon. "The officers wondered if I were a secret French envoy," he recalls.

He bought the piece from the village elders, and later installed it just inside his main salon, so that it was "the first thing you saw to the left, in profile." Guimiot terms the pose a "fetus image — among the oldest of humanity." Guimiot considers this one of "the soberest and most compact" of the many he discovered: "The erosion of the wood creates an impression of life."

Photo by Studio R. Asselberghs-Frédéric Dehaen, Brussels, Courtesy Sotheby's