In 2017, a woman was looking for frames to reuse at a thrift store when she came across a painting that caught her eye. The painting, which was leaning against the wall among other mostly damaged paintings and posters, appears to be signed by NCWyeth, a famous American painter and patriarch of a well-known Maine family of painters.
He bought it for just four dollars (3.71 euros), and joked about the possibility of it being an authentic work. Six years later, the painting is now worth $250,000 (more than 231.5 thousand euros), and is expected to go up for auction this month.
According to auction house Bonhams Skinner, Quoted from CNNThe buyer tried to find information about the business on the Internet, but to no avail. He ended up hanging the painting in his room for several years before storing it in a closet.
In May of this year, when he was cleaning things out, he rediscovered the work and posted a photo on Facebook in a group called “Things in the Walls.”
Comments on that post led her to contact Lauren Lewis, a former curator who worked with the Wyeth family’s works. After seeing the painting in person, he was “99% sure it was real.” He told the Boston Globe.
He added: “Although it had some scratches and could benefit from a cleaning, it was in exceptional condition considering that no one had any idea about its journey over the past 80 years.”
The work turned out to be one of four panels completed in 1939 to illustrate an edition of the book “Ramona,” by Helen Hunt Jackson. The characters represented are characters from the story originally published in 1884. Only one other painting from this collection has been recovered.
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