A painting by Chicago artist Gertrude Abercrombie, purchased for $30 at a Michigan estate sale, just sold for $1,352,600 at auction.
Abercrombie’s 1951 painting “Alderman Merriam’s Shells” sold at Freeman’s Auctions for significantly more than the anticipated $150,000 to $250,000, making it the highest price ever paid for one of the artist’s works. Until the early 2000s, Abercrombie’s paintings were often found in thrift stores.
The painting, measuring just 8 by 11 inches, was given to John Reynolds, a physician in Kalamazoo, Michigan, by Gertrude Abercrombie in exchange for surgical services. In the 1980s, according to CityBiz, Abercrombie expert Susan Weininger documented that Reynolds still owned the painting. However, it later vanished from public view and entered his estate after he lent it to several major museum exhibitions.
The painting ended up being worth over 45,000 times more than what the buyer paid for it
A picker, who asked to remain anonymous, found the painting in July at a Michigan estate sale while looking for midcentury furniture and records. However, he found something else in a hallway leading to the garage: a tiny painting depicting ten shells. Taking a chance, he bought it for $30.
Then, after some research, he visited “The Whole World is a Mystery,” a touring Gertrude Abercrombie retrospective that was on display at the Milwaukee Art Museum this past summer, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
There, he found a photograph of “Alderman Merriam’s Shells” in the exhibition catalog, included with a 1952 Chicago Tribune article about the artist’s show at the Newman Brown Gallery. Even the real shells that are portrayed in the piece were visible in the picture.
It turned out that the painting was legit, and in high demand
Susan Weininger, a professor emerita of art history at Roosevelt University, authenticated the painting. Abercrombie died in 1977 at age 68.
“I got an email saying, ‘found Gertrude Abercrombie painting’. I get a lot of those, so I didn’t have high hopes,” Freeman Auctions’ head of post-war and contemporary art Zack Wirsum told The Art Newspaper. “As soon as I clicked on the image I think I exclaimed an expletive, and I knew that it was just an incredible example by her. And one I had never seen.”
“Obviously, we are over the moon about the record-setting result, and it clearly shows that the spooky sky is the limit for her prices,” Wirsum told the Sun-Times. “What a return on a $30 investment!”