Lost and found: Turns out $4 find at Savers is long-lost N.C. Wyeth painting worth $250K
But a treasure hunter with a good eye picked up a painting in 2017 for $4, stacked with other unwanted items at the Manchester Savers on South Willow Street. She was searching for frames to reuse, something many thrifters do to salvage or repurpose castaway art. The signature on the painting read N.
MANCHESTER, NH – If not for feedback from the Facebook faithful – keyboard experts on every topic from politics to lost pets – a long-lost valuable painting might have languished in obscurity or ended up in the trash heap.
But a treasure hunter with a good eye picked up a painting in 2017 for $4, stacked with other unwanted items at the Manchester Savers on South Willow Street. She was searching for frames to reuse, something many thrifters do to salvage or repurpose castaway art. The signature on the painting read N.C. Wyeth – for Newell Convers Wyeth, patriarch of the famed Wyeth family of painters.
The purchaser – who so far remains anonymous – did a cursory search but couldn’t connect the painting to the famed artist, so she decided to hang the pleasant-looking painting on her wall for a while, then relegated it to her closet where it remained until she went on a cleaning jag in May.
That’s when she posted images of the canvas on the “Things Found on Walls” Facebook group page, a forum with more than 500,000 followers who discuss random but interesting “found” things.
Some of the comments led the art scavenger to contact Lauren Lewis, an art enthusiast who was also a Wyeth expert, and she couldn’t believe her eyes. After some due diligence, it was determined that the painting was an authentic – and valuable – Wyeth.
And that’s how a forgotten thrift-store find landed on the auction block of Bonhams Skinner, a world-famous auction house where it is expected to fetch up to $250,000 when the bidding starts on Sept. 19.
Bruce McColl, Director of Engagement at the Currier Museum, was as surprised as anyone at the news of the local thrift store connection to the Wyeth family.
“It’s thrilling that treasures like an N.C. Wyeth painting can be discovered at a neighborhood Savers. It just so rarely happens,” McColl said.
“The Currier has maintained strong institutional connections with the Wyeth family since the late 1930s. As early as 1939 the Currier hosted Andrew’s first museum exhibition, titled ‘Watercolors by Andrew Wyeth,’ which was followed by a more comprehensive exhibition in 1951, titled, ‘Paintings and Drawings by Andrew Wyeth,’ McColl said.
“Andrew Wyeth’s “Spindrift,” painted during the summer of 1950 and purchased by the Currier soon thereafter, holds a place among paintings by Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper as one of the Museum’s premier examples of American Realism,” McColl said.
The newly-found N.C. Wyeth painting is titled Ramona and is one of four in a series by the artist a 1939 edition of Helen Hunt Jackson’s book by the same name. Two of the four paintings remain at large.
On the auction site, below the formal description of the work, is a category known to art collectors as its provenance – vital in understanding the history of a piece of art such as this, it reads, “Purchased from an antique shop, Manchester, New Hampshire.”
Anyone who’s been on the hunt for an extra large bowl for Thanksgiving dinner or a cheap paperback to read on vacation may never look at their neighborhood Savers in quite the same way.
More than a last-stop for musty, dusty castaway items, it will forever be known as the antique shop where a valuable lost work of art was found.
