Is This Monet The Real Deal?

Two men may have stumbled across a rare art find, and could strike it rich if the painting they bought for $225 at a Ceresco antiques store sells online as an original Monet.

Wayne Rankin and Fred Niemann of Lincoln were offered $1.8 million for their painting on eBay, an Internet auction site, reports CBS Affiliate KOLN-TV, even though a national Impressionism expert has said the work is a copy.

"Research for a year points to it being a genuine," Rankin, who works selling antiques and collectibles on eBay, said Monday.

Rankin and Niemann entered their painting in a 10-day eBay auction that ended Sunday. Their minimum sale price of $3 million was not met, but they are still entertaining an offer from the highest bidder.

Rankin, 40, and Niemann, 38, bought the painting a year ago at Diana's Antiques and Gifts in Ceresco, a village of 825 people about 16 miles north of Lincoln.

"I looked down at it, thought it was beautiful, got a little closer look at the signature, it was none other than Claude Monet," says Rankin.

Store owner Diana Swanson purchased the painting at a Lincoln auction house two years ago. After failing for a year to authenticate the work as an original Monet, Swanson decided to sell it for its frame. The three-by-three-foot painting sat on the floor of her store for a month before Rankin and Niemann showed interest.

"They purchased a fancy picture frame from me that happened to have a painting in it," Swanson said. "I had it just leaning on a cabinet...I had several appraisers look at it, they assured me it wasn't [real] so I didn't think it was."

Before selling the painting, Swanson sent pictures of the work to a San Francisco art company, took it to an international antique show in Omaha and asked Norman Geske, former curator at Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, to view it, all to no avail.

Rankin has spent the past year working to authenticate the painting.

Boats on the Banks of Gennevilliers graced with Claude Monet's signature, can be found in at least two art books, Rankin said. The painting in the men's possession looks just like it.

Monet, the French Impressionist master who died in 1926, painted Boats in 1875. A Seattle law firm helped Rankin find it in the catalog of the Wilbenstein Institute in Paris.

The painting Rankin and Niemann own bears a plaque saying it once was part of Albert Schwabacher's collection. That collection and Boats is listed in Paul Hayes Tucker's book, Monet at Argenteuil.

Polly Sartori, executive vice president of the Impressionism Department at Christie's auction house in New York, deemed the painting a copy. She met Thursday with Rankin and Niemann at the Sheldon.

"There's documentation that it's a copy," a Christie's spokeswoman said Monday. Rankin and Niemann, however, found it hard to believe Sartori's opinion.

"She couldn't be 100 percent certain," Rakin said. "She said yes, no, yes, no. So she confused me."

Thus far, the painting has not been authenticated. The highest bidder in the eBay auction was Mark Borghi, owner of the New York gallery Borghi and Co. He is still interested in buying it, but not until it's proven real, Rankin said.

The owners intend to look elsewhere for authentication, although they do not know where. Meanwhile, the painting sits in storage. The painting, even if a copy, still could be valuable if done during Monet's time, said Christin Mamiya, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln art history professor.

The chances that the painting is an original are slim, Mamiya said. "If this painting were real," she said, "don't you think someone would have looked for it?"