Based on recent headlines, you might think dumpster diving is a pretty profitable enterprise in the art market. There was the March story of the woman in Pennsylvania, Heidi Markow, who bought a drawing allegedly by French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir at an estate sale for $12. The month before, a man in Hudson, New York, actually got into a dumpster to retrieve an 18th-century drawing by British artist George Romney. Not so lucky was the person who spent $50 for a painting at a garage sale in Minnesota that data science art research firm LMI Group said was a lost Van Gogh (the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam put the kibosh on that one), but the 31-inch tall headless and armless marble statue found by a man in a black plastic trash bag in a suburb of Thessaloniki turned out to be a 2,000-year-old Greek artwork.
And that’s just this year! In 2024, the widow of a junk dealer in Italy found a rolled-up canvas by Pablo Picasso in an abandoned basement on the island of Capri that turned out to be worth $6.6 million. An engraving by Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, found by a child in a landfill in England, was sold at auction for £33,390 ($43,000).
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The range of artworks and antiquities discarded or underappreciated is broad, from a Rembrandt portrait found in an attic of a home in Camden, Maine, to a Mayan vase picked up for $3.99 from a clearance shelf in a thrift shop in Maryland. Then there’s J.M.W. Turner watercolor sold with a few other paintings at a Suffolk, England auction for £100 and the John Constable painting hidden in the recesses of a cupboard in Ash, Kent, England. In every instance, the owner did not know what they had, but eventually, someone figured it out, and it’s the eventual sale of these items for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars that makes those headlines so eye-popping.
Perhaps you’re wondering if you’ll be next. Let’s not get carried away. Teri Horton’s $5 thrift shop find was not, in fact, a $50,000,000 Jackson Pollock.
Dumpster divers and flea market aficionados come forward with their finds and their hopes, but those hopes are borne out “quite infrequently, unfortunately,” Marcus Grey, director and head of Rosebery’s auction house’s Picture Department, told Observer. “Just this morning we had to let a client know their drawing is not by J.M.W. Turner. It was inscribed ‘Turner’ on the reverse but not the artist’s signature.”
Breaking the bad news is not limited to auctioneers. “I get a rash of people calling the gallery the day after they see me on Antiques Roadshow,” Debra Force, a Manhattan dealer in American art and regular expert on the long-running PBS show, told Observer. “They can’t read the signature, or they just hope what they have is by someone famous. Often, what they have is a reproduction print that they mistake for a painting. Pretty much everything they are calling about, you can write off right away as not valuable.”
Rarely, a treasure-in-the-trash find will turn out to be the real thing, such as the William Merritt Chase painting that was found last year at a flea market in Kentucky. The buyer who paid a few thousand dollars for it confirmed the artwork’s authenticity through the researcher preparing the artist’s catalogue raisonné—an annotated listing of all the known works of a particular artist—and, Force said, “the piece just seemed right.” Force did not get the consignment for the painting, as the finder shopped it around to numerous dealers, later settling on a couple of auction houses where the artwork ultimately did not sell because the finder’s high selling price was excessive. Getting carried away is all too easy to do.
How art experts handle potentially valuable finds
The lines of people wanting to present objects to experts at Antiques Roadshow tapings are long, and the volume of calls and emails auction houses and dealers receive about lost masterpieces is substantial. Nicholas Hall, a New York City dealer of Old Masters paintings, didn’t mince words: “Actually, the opposite of what they hope is true. People think that they have a Leonardo or a Caravaggio, which actually belongs in a landfill.”
He admits, however, that some finds do turn out to be genuine—perhaps three or four inquiries he receives in the course of a year are for objects that are valuable. But these aren’t headline-makers, just artworks that sell for “maybe tens of thousands of dollars, hardly ever more than that.” There is the occasional diamond in the rough, such as the terra cotta statue misidentified as a 19th-century object and purchased at a Portobello Road antiques flea market in London for $100 that turned out to be a work by 15th-century Italian sculptor Verrocchio. The statue was consigned to him and eventually sold for over $1 million. “That was quite a prize.”
In some cases, the artwork is authentic but isn’t worth anything. Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the London-based Art Loss Register, which maintains a database of lost, stolen and looted art, told Observer that a half-dozen paintings by a Yorkshire Dales artist named Kitty North were found by a construction worker hired to demolish a hotel in London that had gone bankrupt during the pandemic. North had lent the paintings for a pre-pandemic exhibition at the hotel but had not retrieved them before the building was taken down. “The new hotel owner instructed the workers to dispose of the paintings, and most went in the skip,” Radcliffe said, but one of those workers, himself an amateur artist, took possession of them, reporting them to the Art Loss Register, after which they were returned to the artist.
In the rarest of cases, an auction house may not know what they have. Kevin Rhines, a resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, regularly attends sales at a local auction house in a neighboring town. He bid $100 for a print that the auctioneer called a “Margaret,” which turned out to be by the French Surrealist artist René Magritte, and an appraisal for the piece shortly after the sale listed its value at $5,000.
However, finding an inexpensive artwork and flipping it for a considerable amount of money is not usually quick or easy, and it may not be cheap. There may be no money in it at all if the object was stolen, looted or illegally exported from some country that, when it learns of the item through a public sale, makes a claim for its return. Finders’ fees of up to 10 percent of the object’s value have been paid occasionally, but the person who acquired the item will often just turn it over. “You might get a medal, or there might be a handover celebration, but a finder’s fee is pretty rare,” said Mari-Claudia Jiménez, former global head of business development for Sotheby’s and now an art lawyer in private practice in New York City. She worked for a law firm that represented the Turkish government, which made demands for the return of artifacts taken out of the country illegally.
What to do if you think you have a lost masterpiece
For inveterate dumpster divers or flea market devotees who think they have something of value on their hands, there is a process for determining if an artwork is legit. Dealers and auction houses encourage people to take photographs of items they have found and to email those images to them. Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have dedicated online portals where images of objects may be submitted for review by staffers who will follow up if something is of interest. Private dealers and galleries usually welcome such inquiries, provided the inquirer uses the proper channels. “I don’t like people to bring things to my gallery. That’s too invasive,” Force clarified. “Start with an email.” If an object looks interesting, she will respond by asking for additional information—where the person found it and if they might know about it.
Two more possible sources of information about the work of specific artists are the aforementioned catalogue raisonné—this is more applicable to renowned artists than to less well-known ones—and authentication committees. There are more of the latter in Europe than in the United States because committees abroad can render opinions without the legal repercussions that have closed so many of these groups in the U.S. Scholars at a university who specialize in a relevant area of art or antiquities may also be able to offer guidance.
“Different artists have different methods of authentication,” Grey said. “Works by Banksy, for example, can only be authenticated via Pest Control. Works by well-known artists from the 20th Century will need to be shown to an expert or a committee to be authenticated. However, many artists in the middle market don’t have a formal authentication process, and the attribution will rely on the expertise of auction house specialists and academics.”
There are also organizations that perform scientific analyses of artworks that involve conducting tests of objects of uncertain provenance—one of the most famous is the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago, which evaluates paints, canvases and other molecular elements of paintings to determine their age and where they were created. When flea market scavengers holding potentially valuable objects create a dossier of background information for a dealer or auction house specialist, it is more likely that those in the trade will be more interested in the object.
Dealers and auction house specialists are not always themselves experts in specific artists, but they know who and where the experts are, and they will contact these experts and even ship off an artwork for first-hand examination by them when they believe an attribution is likely. Expertise, like scientific analysis, is not free, and the dealer or auction house may absorb the cost of shipping and an expert’s time, but typically only after the person who found the artwork agrees that the dealer or auction house will have the right to sell the piece (and then those costs may be wrapped up in the agreed-upon commission).
Another costly element of trash-to-treasure finds, Hall added, is cleaning. “No expert can see a painting through dirty varnish, so cleaning is another expense,” again to be negotiated with the prospective consignor. “It takes time and money to establish authenticity.” So, search that flea market and the Salvation Army shelves or dive into all the landfills you want, but don’t expect miracles.
