One day, an employee at a tool-and-die company in Indiana spent $30 for a few pieces of used furniture and an old painting of some flowers and decided to strategically hang the picture to cover up a hole in the wall that had been bugging him.
Some years later he was playing a board game called Masterpiece in which players attempt to outbid one another for artwork at an auction. Much to his surprise, one of the cards in the game featured a painting of flowers that looked a lot like the one he had on his wall. He found that his painting was similar in style to the work of Martin Johnson Heade, an American still-life artist best known for landscapes and flower arrangements.
He asked the Kennedy Galleries in Manhattan, which handles many of Heade's works, to take a look at his painting. They verified that the piece of artwork covering the hole in his wall was a previously unknown Heade painting, since named Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth. In 1999, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston purchased the painting for $1.2 million dollars.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
The man who bought a $30 painting worth 1.2 million dollars
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The collector who found $200,000 in coins after cleaning out an abandoned house
Jeff Bidelman, a Johnstown Rare Collectibles owner, was helping a family clean out the house their relative had abandoned over twenty years ago. As he was dragging a bag of old coins downstairs, he noticed a hole in an upstairs wall. When the first floor got torn down, a mounting pile of gold coins was found. In total, Bidelman found at least $8,500 of coins at face value. He estimates the actual value of the coins could be as high as $200,000. Apparently, they had been thrown down the hole Bidelman had noticed earlier.
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