An oil painting that was purchased for just $30 at an estate sale fetched more than $1.35 million at auction after it was confirmed that it was the work of famous surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie.
The painting is an 8-by-11-inch still-life, and was discovered in a “dark corner” of a Michigan home in July, according to Freeman’s, the auction house that brought the painting to market this month, CNN reported.
An expert went on to identify it as Abercrombie’s “Alderman Merriam’s Shells. It had been unseen in public for almost 75 years.
It was more than triple its high estimate. He recalled telling visitors at the Milwaukee exhibition that Abercrombie’s paintings sometimes do crop up at estate sales.
Sotheby’s sold another of Abercrombie’s paintings in 2025 – “Message for Mercy” – for a then-record $1.02 million. In a press release before the sale, the auction house’s senior vice president Zachary Wirsum said the rediscovery of the painting was “magnificent. “Little did I know that one of those ‘once in a while’s would occur less than a month later,” Wirsum said.
The painting, completed in 1951, depicts a collection of ten seashells. At the time, it was priced between $50 and $150. Upon seeing the signature, the buyer took a $30 gamble. In an exhibition catalog there, a 1952 news clipping showed a photo of the painting next to the real-life shells it depicts. Freeman’s valued the painting at $150,000 to $250,000.
It is a common motif used by Abercrombie, who is often described as American art’s “Bohemian Queen. It was exhibited at six of the painter’s solo exhibitions over the next couple of years. The artist, however, never sold the work. Instead, she gifted it to a doctor in Kalamazoo, Michigan in exchange for medical services. The painting was then passed down through the doctor’s estate after his death, and then eventually appeared at July’s estate sale. The buyer has remained anonymous. The auctioneer described the buyer as “a longtime hunter of record albums and mid-century furniture. The bargain hunter eventually took the artwork to Freeman’s auction house. It was one of the exhibition sponsors. The work was authenticated as genuine by Abercrombie expert Susan Weininger, an art history professor at Roosevelt University. Art restorer Julian Baumgartner later cleaned the painting. However, bids at last Thursday’s sale far surpassed estimates, setting a new auction record for Abercrombie’s work.
Freeman’s said that the painting had been discovered “tucked in a dark corner of a hallway leading to the garage — overlooked by every other buyer that day. The signature – “Abercrombie, ‘51” – was hardly visible against the dark background. Freeman’s said that they diverted a family vacation to visit Milwaukee Art Museum, where an Abercrombie exhibition was on show. “It was drab, missing its life, but now cleaned, retouched, and revarnished, it’s alive and radiant,” Baumgartner said.
