PHILADELPHIA — A painting of seashells that sat for 75 years in a Michigan family's house, then sold for $30 at an estate sale this past summer, brought $1.35 million at auction this week — a record for the Chicago surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie and one of the more startling discovery-to-sale turnarounds the art market has seen in some time.
The 1951 canvas, titled "Alderman Merriam's Shells", had been hiding in plain sight. Abercrombie painted it after a collection belonging to Chicago Alderman Robert Merriam, then gave the work to Dr. John Reynolds, a Kalamazoo physician, in 1952 as thanks for medical treatment. It stayed with the Reynolds family for three generations, eventually landing, unidentified, among the contents of an estate sale in Kalamazoo, Michigan, this July.
A buyer paid $30 for it without knowing what they had. Research and authentication connected the canvas to Abercrombie, a painter who ran in Chicago's midcentury jazz and bohemian circles — a friend of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk — and whose small, spare paintings have drawn a slow-building wave of market interest over the past decade.
Once confirmed, the work went to Freeman's auction house in Philadelphia, where it carried a pre-sale estimate of $150,000 to $250,000 ahead of the Post-War and Contemporary Art auction on October 1. Bidding blew past that range and closed at $1.35 million, according to a report on the sale — more than 40,000 times what it fetched a few months earlier, and the highest price ever paid for Abercrombie's work.
Abercrombie died in 1977 largely outside the gallery spotlight, and for decades her paintings moved quietly among collectors who knew her work firsthand from Chicago. That has been changing: a single-owner sale of her paintings at another auction house topped $2.8 million in 2022, part of a broader reassessment of women artists associated with the Surrealist movement. The Kalamazoo find adds an unusually tidy story to that revival — a reminder that estate sales, usually a source of furniture and chipped dishware, occasionally hand over something that belongs in a museum.
The identity of the original $30 buyer, now considerably richer, has not been made public.
