{"id":3525,"date":"2025-04-10T12:44:35","date_gmt":"2025-04-10T12:44:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/10\/the-dream-of-lost-masterpieces-and-the-realities-of-art-authentication\/"},"modified":"2025-04-10T12:44:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T12:44:41","slug":"the-dream-of-lost-masterpieces-and-the-realities-of-art-authentication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/10\/the-dream-of-lost-masterpieces-and-the-realities-of-art-authentication\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dream of Lost Masterpieces and the Realities of Art Authentication"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
<\/a>
Rembrandt van Rhijn\u2018s Adoration of the Magi\u00a0<\/em>from 1632 was rediscovered in 2021. Fine Art Images\/Heritage Images\/Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Based on recent headlines, you might think dumpster diving is a pretty profitable enterprise in the art market. There was the March story of the woman in Pennsylvania, Heidi Markow<\/a>, who bought a drawing allegedly by French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir at an estate sale for $12. The month before, a man in Hudson, New York, actually got into a dumpster to retrieve an 18th-century drawing by British artist George Romney. Not so lucky was the person who spent $50 for a painting at a garage sale in Minnesota that data science art research firm LMI Group said was a lost Van Gogh<\/a> (the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam put the kibosh on that one), but the 31-inch tall headless and armless marble statue found by a man in a black plastic trash bag in a suburb of Thessaloniki turned out to be a 2,000-year-old Greek artwork.<\/p>\n

\n<\/section>\n

And that\u2019s just this year! In 2024, the widow of a junk dealer in Italy found a rolled-up canvas by Pablo Picasso in an abandoned basement on the island of Capri that turned out to be worth $6.6 million. An engraving by Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht D\u00fcrer, found by a child in a landfill in England, was sold at auction for \u00a333,390 ($43,000).<\/p>\n

\n

SEE ALSO: Marsi Gray On Bringing Meow Wolf\u2019s Immersive Art to the Seaport\u2019s Pier 17 <\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The range of artworks and antiquities discarded or underappreciated is broad, from a Rembrandt portrait found in an attic of a home in Camden, Maine, to a Mayan vase picked up for $3.99 from a clearance shelf in a thrift shop in Maryland. Then there\u2019s J.M.W. Turner<\/a> watercolor sold with a few other paintings at a Suffolk, England auction for \u00a3100 and the John Constable<\/a> painting hidden in the recesses of a cupboard in Ash, Kent, England. In every instance, the owner did not know what they had, but eventually, someone figured it out, and it\u2019s the eventual sale of these items for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars that makes those headlines so eye-popping.<\/p>\n

Perhaps you\u2019re wondering if you\u2019ll be next. Let\u2019s not get carried away. Teri Horton\u2019s $5 thrift shop find was not, in fact, a $50,000,000 Jackson Pollock<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dumpster divers and flea market aficionados come forward with their finds and their hopes, but those hopes are borne out \u201cquite infrequently, unfortunately,\u201d Marcus Grey<\/a>, director and head of Rosebery\u2019s auction house\u2019s Picture Department, told Observer. \u201cJust this morning we had to let a client know their drawing is not by J.M.W. Turner. It was inscribed \u2018Turner\u2019 on the reverse but not the artist\u2019s signature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Breaking the bad news is not limited to auctioneers. \u201cI get a rash of people calling the gallery the day after they see me on Antiques Roadshow<\/i>,\u201d Debra Force<\/a>, a Manhattan dealer in American art and regular expert on the long-running PBS show, told Observer. \u201cThey can\u2019t read the signature, or they just hope what they have is by someone famous. Often, what they have is a reproduction print that they mistake for a painting. Pretty much everything they are calling about, you can write off right away as not valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rarely, a treasure-in-the-trash find will turn out to be the real thing, such as the William Merritt Chase<\/a> painting that was found last year at a flea market in Kentucky. The buyer who paid a few thousand dollars for it confirmed the artwork\u2019s authenticity through the researcher preparing the artist\u2019s catalogue raisonn\u00e9\u2014an annotated listing of all the known works of a particular artist\u2014and, Force said, \u201cthe piece just seemed right.\u201d Force did not get the consignment for the painting, as the finder shopped it around to numerous dealers, later settling on a couple of auction houses where the artwork ultimately did not sell because the finder\u2019s high selling price was excessive. Getting carried away is all too easy to do.<\/p>\n

How art experts handle potentially valuable finds<\/h3>\n

The lines of people wanting to present objects to experts at Antiques Roadshow<\/i> tapings are long, and the volume of calls and emails auction houses and dealers receive about lost masterpieces is substantial. Nicholas Hall<\/a>, a New York City dealer of Old Masters paintings, didn\u2019t mince words: \u201cActually, the opposite of what they hope is true. People think that they have a Leonardo or a Caravaggio, which actually belongs in a landfill.\u201d<\/p>\n

He admits, however, that some finds do turn out to be genuine\u2014perhaps three or four inquiries he receives in the course of a year are for objects that are valuable. But these aren\u2019t headline-makers, just artworks that sell for \u201cmaybe tens of thousands of dollars, hardly ever more than that.\u201d There is the occasional diamond in the rough, such as the terra cotta statue misidentified as a 19th-century object and purchased at a Portobello Road antiques flea market in London for $100 that turned out to be a work by 15th-century Italian sculptor Verrocchio. The statue was consigned to him and eventually sold for over $1 million. \u201cThat was quite a prize.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>
Marcus Grey, of Roseberys Fine Art Auctioneers in London, told Observer that many artists in the middle market don\u2019t have a formal authentication process and attribution hinges on the expertise of auction specialists and academics. Courtesy Roseberys Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In some cases, the artwork is authentic but isn\u2019t worth anything. Julian Radcliffe<\/a>, chairman of the London-based Art Loss Register, which maintains a database of lost, stolen and looted art, told Observer that a half-dozen paintings by a Yorkshire Dales artist named Kitty North<\/a> were found by a construction worker hired to demolish a hotel in London that had gone bankrupt during the pandemic. North had lent the paintings for a pre-pandemic exhibition at the hotel but had not retrieved them before the building was taken down. \u201cThe new hotel owner instructed the workers to dispose of the paintings, and most went in the skip,\u201d Radcliffe said, but one of those workers, himself an amateur artist, took possession of them, reporting them to the Art Loss Register, after which they were returned to the artist.<\/p>\n

In the rarest of cases, an auction house may not know what they have. Kevin Rhines<\/a>, a resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, regularly attends sales at a local auction house in a neighboring town. He bid $100 for a print that the auctioneer called a \u201cMargaret,\u201d which turned out to be by the French Surrealist artist Ren\u00e9 Magritte, and an appraisal for the piece shortly after the sale listed its value at $5,000.<\/p>\n

However, finding an inexpensive artwork and flipping it for a considerable amount of money is not usually quick or easy, and it may not be cheap. There may be no money in it at all if the object was stolen, looted or illegally exported from some country that, when it learns of the item through a public sale, makes a claim for its return. Finders\u2019 fees of up to 10 percent of the object\u2019s value have been paid occasionally, but the person who acquired the item will often just turn it over. \u201cYou might get a medal, or there might be a handover celebration, but a finder\u2019s fee is pretty rare,\u201d said Mari-Claudia Jim\u00e9nez, former global head of business development for Sotheby\u2019s<\/a> and now an art lawyer in private practice in New York City. She worked for a law firm that represented the Turkish government, which made demands for the return of artifacts taken out of the country illegally.<\/p>\n

What to do if you think you have a lost masterpiece<\/h3>\n

For inveterate dumpster divers or flea market devotees who think they have something of value on their hands, there is a process for determining if an artwork is legit. Dealers and auction houses encourage people to take photographs of items they have found and to email those images to them. Both Christie\u2019s and Sotheby\u2019s have dedicated online portals where images of objects may be submitted for review by staffers who will follow up if something is of interest. Private dealers and galleries usually welcome such inquiries, provided the inquirer uses the proper channels. \u201cI don\u2019t like people to bring things to my gallery. That\u2019s too invasive,\u201d Force clarified. \u201cStart with an email.\u201d If an object looks interesting, she will respond by asking for additional information\u2014where the person found it and if they might know about it.<\/p>\n

Two more possible sources of information about the work of specific artists are the aforementioned catalogue raisonn\u00e9\u2014this is more applicable to renowned artists than to less well-known ones\u2014and authentication committees. There are more of the latter in Europe than in the United States because committees abroad can render opinions without the legal repercussions that have closed so many of these groups in the U.S. Scholars at a university who specialize in a relevant area of art or antiquities may also be able to offer guidance.<\/p>\n

\u201cDifferent artists have different methods of authentication,\u201d Grey said. \u201cWorks by Banksy, for example, can only be authenticated via Pest Control. Works by well-known artists from the 20th Century will need to be shown to an expert or a committee to be authenticated. However, many artists in the middle market don\u2019t have a formal authentication process, and the attribution will rely on the expertise of auction house specialists and academics.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are also organizations that perform scientific analyses of artworks that involve conducting tests of objects of uncertain provenance\u2014one of the most famous is the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago, which evaluates paints, canvases and other molecular elements of paintings to determine their age and where they were created. When flea market scavengers holding potentially valuable objects create a dossier of background information for a dealer or auction house specialist, it is more likely that those in the trade will be more interested in the object.<\/p>\n

Dealers and auction house specialists are not always themselves experts in specific artists, but they know who and where the experts are, and they will contact these experts and even ship off an artwork for first-hand examination by them when they believe an attribution is likely. Expertise, like scientific analysis, is not free, and the dealer or auction house may absorb the cost of shipping and an expert\u2019s time, but typically only after the person who found the artwork agrees that the dealer or auction house will have the right to sell the piece (and then those costs may be wrapped up in the agreed-upon commission).<\/p>\n

Another costly element of trash-to-treasure finds, Hall added, is cleaning. \u201cNo expert can see a painting through dirty varnish, so cleaning is another expense,\u201d again to be negotiated with the prospective consignor. \u201cIt takes time and money to establish authenticity.\u201d So, search that flea market and the Salvation Army shelves or dive into all the landfills you want, but don\u2019t expect miracles.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"The<\/p><\/div>\n