An 8-by-11-inch painting of seashells, bought for $30 at a Michigan estate sale, sold for $1.35 million at auction in New York this month — setting a new record for the artist who painted it, and a fairly good return on $30.
The work, titled "Alderman Merriam's Shells" and dated 1951, is by Gertrude Abercrombie, a Chicago surrealist painter who hosted jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins at her Hyde Park home but had little national recognition in her lifetime, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. A picker who wished to remain anonymous found the painting last July in a hallway leading to the garage at a Kalamazoo estate sale and paid $30 for it without knowing who had made it, the New York Times reports.
The buyer later matched the shells in his photo to a catalog image from a Milwaukee Art Museum retrospective of Abercrombie's work, paired with a 1952 newspaper review of one of her gallery shows. Susan Weininger, an art historian and Abercrombie specialist at Roosevelt University, authenticated the piece. Its provenance traced back to a Kalamazoo doctor, who had received the painting directly from Abercrombie in 1952 in exchange for medical services; it stayed with his family for roughly 75 years before the estate sale.
At Freeman's auction house, bidding pushed the hammer price to $1,060,000, which came to $1,352,600 after the buyer's premium — making it the first Abercrombie work to clear $1 million at auction. "What a return on a $30 investment!" Freeman's senior vice president Zachary Wirsum said, adding that the result shows "the spooky sky is the limit for her prices."
Abercrombie's paintings, often moody self-portraits and still lifes tinged with the surreal, could still be found in thrift stores as recently as the early 2000s, before collector interest in her work began climbing. This sale cements that shift, and likely sends more buyers digging through estate-sale hallways with a little more care.