Christie's has won a case at the Court of Appeal in London against a ruling that it was negligent to catalogue these two vases as 'Louis XV'

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Caption: Christie's has won a case at the Court of Appeal in London against a ruling that it was negligent to catalogue these two vases as 'Louis XV'. Taylor Lynne Thomson, who bought them for 2 million [pounds sterling] at the Marquess of Cholmondeley's sale in 1994, sued Christie's for negligence last year after analysis suggested the possibility of a nineteenth-century date, which would have greatly reduced the vases' value. The key appeal decision is that an auction house need not qualify a lot description with the word 'probably' as long as the evidence that might raise such a doubt has been dismissed after sensible evaluation. In this case, nineteenth-century gilding could not adequately contradict an eighteenth-century date that all the other evidence suggested. Moreover, the fact that auction houses make statements of opinion is sufficiently obvious that a client, even a valuable one, need not be reminded of it.

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