A buyer paid $30 for a faint-signed canvas tucked in a dark hallway at an estate sale. Experts later confirmed it was worth far more.
In July, at an estate sale in a home in Michigan, a buyer stopped in front of an unremarkable canvas standing in a dark corner of the hallway leading to the garage. It showed a group of seashells, with a faint signature barely visible in the corner. The buyer, a collector of vinyl records and mid-century furniture, paid $30 for it.
At home, he looked closer at the signature and set out to identify the artist. A visit to an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum turned up a 1952 newspaper clipping showing the very same painting photographed beside real seashells. Art historian Susan Weininger of Roosevelt University later confirmed its authenticity.
The artist was Gertrude Abercrombie, a self-taught painter from the circle of Chicago surrealists, known as the "bohemian queen" of American art. She painted "Alderman Merriam's Shells" in 1951 and showed it at six solo exhibitions, pricing it at $50 to $150 at the time. She never sold it, giving it instead to a doctor in Kalamazoo in gratitude for his care. It passed through his estate before reaching that same sale almost 75 years later.
Restorer Julian Baumgartner cleaned away decades of grime and clouded varnish. "It was drab, missing its life, but now cleaned, retouched and revarnished, it's alive and radiant," he said. Auction house Freeman's had estimated the painting at $150,000 to $250,000; it sold for more than $1.35 million, a new record for Abercrombie, whose previous top price was $1.02 million.
