Painting bought for $4 at New Hampshire thrift shop could sell for $250,000 at auction
MANCHESTER, N.H. - A New Hampshire thrift store shopper was looking for old frames to repurpose when she stumbled upon an antique hunter's dream. Now a painting she bought for $4 could sell for as much as $250,000, an auction house says.
The Bonhams auction house says the woman was looking through a large stack of frames at a Savers store in Manchester back in 2017 when she found the "quite heavy and dusty" painting in the middle of a stack and put it in her shopping cart.
What she had accidentally discovered was a painting by Needham-born artist NC Wyeth - one of four illustrations for a 1939 edition of the Helen Hunt Jackson novel "Ramona." Wyeth was a successful illustrator whose work appeared on the cover of "The Saturday Evening Post."
"Not knowing what she had found, she joked about it being a real painting," a spokeswoman for Bonhams said. "But after not finding anything in a quick internet search, didn't give it another thought."
She hung the painting in her bedroom for a few years before taking it down and storing it in her closet. But after doing some spring cleaning this year, she decided to post some photos of it on the Facebook page "Things Found in Walls."
That brought the painting to the attention of a conservator in Maine, who drove three hours to see it in person and determined it was "actually legitimate and valuable," the auction house said.
The painting is believed to have been gifted by book publishers to an editor or to the estate of Jackson. Bonhams expects the painting to sell for between $150,000 and $250,000 at an auction in Marlboro.