Replete with 18th-century Chinese, French and Meissen porcelain in French Rococo gilt-bronze mounts, the 70-lot sale of furniture and objets d’art amassed by the textiles magnate Léon Lévy is expected to earn between €5 million and €8 million ($7.3–11.8 million) at Sotheby’s Paris on October 2, making the collection the most important of its type the firm has offered in the French capital.

Lévy started purchasing art after fleeing his native Egypt in 1960 during president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s anti-Semitic regime. At 37, he settled in Geneva and began regularly attending and buying at auctions, a practice he continued almost up to his death, last April. In fact, Lévy snared a pair of Kangxi (1662– 1722) celadon potpourri vases mounted in Louis XV ormolu at Sotheby’s Paris as recently as October 2006 for €760,000 ($1.1 million). This same pair—buoyed by the record €2.7 million ($4 million) fetched at Sotheby’s London on July 8 by a Chinese porcelain potpourri vase from the Dimitri Mavrommatis collection—is among four lots in the October sale expected to fetch around $1.5 million. The others are a circa 1720 Régence Boulle marquetry console (est. €600,000–1 million; $883,000–1.8 million); a set of three Chinese vases from the mid-18th century (est. €700,000–1 million; $1– 1.5 million); and a pair of Louis XVI candelabra with Sèvres caryatids (est. €800,000– 1.2 million; $1.2–1.8 million), gifts to the future queen of Spain from the French king, her cousin, in 1785.

Mario Tavella, the head of European furniture at Sotheby’s, says that the firm’s Galerie Charpentier salesroom will be transformed during the viewing, September 26 through October 1, into a replica of the top floor of the collector’s office building, where he kept his acquisitions.

"Gold Mine" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2008 Table of Contents.