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One of the best things about visiting a thrift shop is that you never know what you are going to find. Case in point: A woman in Ohio bought a painting for $2.99 at a thrift shop just for the frame. The painting ended up being auctioned for $2,875.
Marissa Alcorn of Dayton, Ohio and her fiance were just browsing at a Goodwill store after dinner one night when she spotted an interesting frame that a store employee had just brought out from the back of the thrift shop. Despite thinking that it was an “awful painting,” she couldn’t pass up the $2.99 price because of the frame.
“I love to go thrifting. I thrift for the stuff for my studio mostly. Or my house – my house is 90% thrifted,” Alcorn told WDTN News.
“My fiance Arron and I had just got done with dinner he convinced me to go to a Goodwill store,” she said. “We did a lap around the store and didn’t find anything and I was, like, ‘see, I didn’t find anything, I told you I didn’t want to be here,’ and this lady brought a cart out right before we were about to leave and I saw the corner of the frame.”
As she was putting the painting into her car she saw something on the frame that she didn’t notice when looking at it in the store.
“It had a little plaque at the bottom of the frame,” Alcorn said. “Out of curiosity, I type in the name and find out it was Johann Berthelsen.”
It turns out that Johann Henrik Carl Berthelsen was an American Impressionist painter who passed away at the age of 88 in 1972. He has public collections of his work all over the United States, including at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis, the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
“My first thought was, ‘this isn’t real'” she recalled. “‘It’s probably just a fake.'”
It wasn’t a fake and after posting about it on Facebook, an auction house in Cincinnati accepted the painting.
“While it was listed in this auction – people were pre bidding on it – so it started out at like $600 and on auction day it made its way up to $1,500,” she said. “It lasted like approximately 30 seconds and it was like a bidding war it was like and then it settled on $2,300. I couldn’t believe it.”
It ended up being sold for $2,875. Pretty good return on an investment of just $2.99.