A Painting Donated to a Charity Shop Was Found to Be a Lost $26 Million Masterpiece

Charity shops occasionally hide masterpieces. Few discoveries are as dramatic as the auction house finds of the past two decades.

The Renoir Story

In 2009, a woman in Virginia bought a small impressionist landscape from a flea market for under $7. She nearly threw it away. When she eventually sent it for evaluation, it turned out to be Pierre-Auguste Renoir's "Paysage Bords de Seine," a piece presumed lost since the 1920s. It was insured for $100,000 and expected to fetch many times that at auction. The case was complicated when the FBI determined the painting had been stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951; it was returned to the museum.

Even Larger Finds

• Caravaggio "Judith and Holofernes" (2014): Found in an attic in Toulouse, France. Authenticated and valued at $170 million. Sold privately just before public auction.
• Salvator Mundi (Leonardo da Vinci): Bought for $1,175 in a 2005 estate auction, originally listed as a Boltraffio copy. Authenticated and resold in 2017 for $450 million — the most expensive painting ever sold.
• Cimabue "Christ Mocked" (2019): Found in a French kitchen, presumed to be a religious print. Authenticated as a 13th-century original and sold for $26 million.

How Do These Slip Through?

Old families inherit paintings without records. Estates are liquidated quickly. Restoration over the centuries can obscure a master's signature. Most importantly: most "old paintings" really are unimportant. The few that aren't get found, eventually, by people willing to invest in expert evaluation.

The lesson, perhaps: never throw away the painting your grandmother left you, until at least one art historian has looked at it.