Shock: grandma's painting sells for $600,000 · 2007-02-11 13:19
A woman who auctioned an old painting hoping to get a few thousand dollars toward her daughter's college tuition was stunned when the picture fetched $600,000.
"This was a surprise to all of us," the seller, who asked to remain anonymous, told the San Francisco Chronicle in a story published Thursday. "It still hasn’t registered yet. We’re all in shock."
The picture sold Sunday by Clars Auction Gallery in Oakland to an unnamed New York dealer has no title or signature and staff of the gallery couldn’t determine its origins.
Redge Martin, president of Clars, said Thursday he doesn’t know why the painting brought in so much money but the buzz in the art world is that someone thinks it’s the lost work of a 17th-century Italian master, Pier Francesco Mola.
Paintings by Mola hang in several museums. The highest price paid for his work appears to be $2.8 million, although several have sold for $100,000 or less, Martin said.
The painting shows a gray-haired, bearded man working on papers with an armillary sphere ??“ an instrument used in ancient astronomy ??“ in the background.
The seller inherited the painting, which had been given to her grandmother as a gift and hung for years in her home in Pisa, Italy. The seller stored the painting for several months in her Southern California garage and eventually hung it over her piano.
When the family’s oldest daughter was accepted to the University of California, Berkeley, the seller decided to see what it would bring.
The family plans to use the money for tuition and perhaps pay off the mortgage, San Jose Mercury News reports.
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