Md. woman's $7 flea market find actually lost Renoir
A Maryland woman assumed this 1987 painting was a fake when she purchased it at a flea market for $7. / WJZ
(CBSNews) BALTIMORE - A Maryland woman lived an antique collector's dream when she came across a Renoir masterpiece shoved in a box at a West Virginia flea market.
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told CBS affiliate WJZ-TV by phone she spent only $7 on a box of items. One of those items happened to be a 1879 painting by the iconic French impressionist that had been missing since the 1920s - which could fetch at least $75,000.
"I noticed the frame on this picture and I liked the frame. I bid $7 and I won the box," she told WJZ-TV.
It wasn't until a year later when the Maryland woman wanted to take the painting out of the frame that she realized what she really had on her hands. Her mother spotted the name Renoir on the edging, a French gallery label and a stock number.
The woman brought the painting to the Potomack Company Auction House by late August. They confirmed it was indeed an authentic work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's, titled in French, "A Landscape on the Banks of the River Seine." It's estimated to be worth $75,000 to $100,000, but its story makes it all the more invaluable, experts say.
The auction house said its getting calls from all over the world because the painting was last heard about in 1926, WJZ-TV reports.
"It really is a needle in a haystack. Just unbelievable that something is out there, lost for so long and waiting to be found," said auction house owner Elizabeth Wainstein.
How did the painting end up in a flea market to begin with? That's still a mystery. But the Maryland winner said she feels pretty lucky to have ever come across it.
"I'm living proof you don't know what you get in a box," she said. "One man's trash is another man's treasure."
The Renoir will be up for public auction on Sept. 29. The woman told The Huffington Post she plans on using the money to go on a trip to Paris.
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The woman pretended to know nothing about art, however, it turns out her Mother was an art expert who went to art school in Baltimore around the time the painting was stolen from a museum there. Mother was also a specialist in making reproduction Renoir's. Daughter worked at her mother's art school in Virginia. Now we know why the daughter wanted to remain anonymous. The FBI has confiscated the stolen art.
john92021 - "A carved gilded frame in a box would never go for $7" - how could you be so sure? Not everyone is an expert & could tell that the frame is hand-carved & has real gold-leaf overlay - they may have thought the frame was cast resin with gold paint & not worth much, & they didn't like the painting, so out it went. Again, just theory.
Some Rich idiot bought it back during that last big GOP Boom-Bust-Meltdown cycle (Great Depression) and there it's been ever since.
Hanging on some Rich guy's wall for decades until the sorry putz checked out. Somebody went in and boxed up all their stuff and there you go. It got lost.
So much for them putting the money back into the system and creating jobs like the GOP says all the Rich people do.
No Mitt, they put their money overseas, or into art or whatever blows their selfish, styled hair back and frankly, could give a flying @#$@ less about the country or anybody else.
Some see a long lost Renoir painting here. I see just another example of selfish, failed trickle down economics.
If you actually had any reading comprehension skills, you'd see I never said a Republican bought that painting.
Could have been any Rich guy. The point is the selfish waste of greed doesn't translate into benefiting anyone other than those themselves. Ergo, the Republicans were in power during the last Great Boom-Bust cycle, which gave us the Great Depression. 12 years later, the US dug itself out of that mess.
Today, the GOP keeps droning on about doing the same things they did from 2000-2008 again. The very things that got us into the current situation, despite all their feeble attempts to ignore anything prior to 2008, the facts are the facts.
Team Failure want's another crack at it again. How many times will they try trickle down? 20? 100? Before people realize that Boom-Bust cycles don't do anything besides make the Rich richer and the Poor poorer.
Although I can't blame you for saying that. I can easily see how you would naturally assume it was a Republican. That would be the logical conclusion.
It's been my experience that flea markets sell items at fixed (though sometimes negotiable) prices. In this case, it reads as though she bid on the item which would have been an auction, not a flea market as written in the first paragraph.