From Artnet News by Menachem Wecker, May 3, 2021

Aficionados of Antiques Roadshow know that treasure sometimes hides in plain sight (if it isn’t a hoax or dud). And in operatic fashion, masterpieces often surface in prosaic domestic settings: attics, cellars, and garages.

It’s precisely the romantic, slovenly nature—ideally blocked by cobwebs—of these spaces that draws us to discoveries therein. There’s something about the rags-to-riches unlikeliness of it all, such as turning $721,765 in profit on a Chinese bowl purchased for $35 at a Connecticut yard sale.

Portrait of a Lady (1916–17)
Gustav Klimt

Time lost: 1997–2019 (around 23 years)

Found: Hidden in a gallery wall

Why it’s a treasure: The canvas, which was stolen and missing for decades, is a kind of palimpsest, having been painted over a portrait of a different girl. “Klimt had painted over the portrait when the girl died suddenly, to forget the pain of her death,” the BBC reported. An Italian city council member—apparently unaware of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, among other stolen works—called it “the most sought-after stolen painting in the world after Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence.”

Time lost: Around 1760–2008 (around 250 years)

Found: A French chateau attic

Why it’s a treasure: Empress Elizabeth of Russia is thought to have commissioned this work, although history doesn’t record whether she, who died in 1762, ever received it. It is among very few surviving Tiepolo paintings of “beautiful women in fancy dress,” works of “idealized feminine beauty [that] remain among the most famous and easily recognized of all Tiepolo’s works,” notes Sotheby’s, which sold the work for $3.1 million in 2017. (Christie’s sold it for £2.8 million less than a decade prior.)

Surprise: The work was cast into an attic “because its semi-naked subject was considered too risque,” reports Reuters.

Per Christie’s: “Her long absence from public scrutiny has had its blessings, ensuring that the picture has been preserved—never lined and never cleaned.” It’s very fitting that this Tiepolo, which was veiled for being too visible, finally returned to the public some 200 years later.

Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell) (ca. 1624–25)
Rembrandt van Rijn

Time lost: Unclear. Found in July 2015

Found: In a New Jersey basement

Why it’s a treasure: The small, early Rembrandt, made when he was about the voting age in the state where the painting was found, “does not feature the strong chiaroscuro effects, subdued palette, and complex psychological tension normally associated with Rembrandt’s works,” note Alexandra Libby, Ilona van Tuinen, and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., in a text published by the Leiden Collection. It was also covered in dirt and yellow varnish and put within a larger panel, where someone else extended the work. When the varnish was removed, it was clear that it had suppressed Rembrandt’s brilliant palette. The subject of the work—smell—which is part of a larger series, also represents a Dutch penchant, as a Mauritshuis show demonstrates.

Surprise: Nye and Company auctioneers identified it as an unsigned “triple portrait with lady fainting“ dated to the 19th century “Continental School.” Bidding started at $250. Then the work sold for $870,000. That was well above the estimate of $500 to $800. At the time, the auction house director told Artnet News that he had “no inclination that it was going to do anything like what it did.” He told Reuters the painting was “remarkably unremarkable” and “looked like a dark, discolored portrait of three people, one of whom is passed out.” The original owners may have passed out themselves when they learned it went for between $3 and $4 million thereafter.

Sunset at Montmajour (1888)
Vincent van Gogh

Time lost: 1901–70 (69 years), but later known to have been purchased in 1908. Authenticated in 2011.

Found: In a Norwegian attic

Why it’s a treasure: When Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum unveiled the work in 2013, its director said: “This is a great painting from what many see as the high point of his artistic achievement, his period in Arles, in southern France,” the Associated Press reported. “In the same period, he painted works such as Sunflowers, The Yellow House, and The Bedroom.”

The artist, writing to brother Theo, called the sunset he depicted “romantic… The sun was pouring its very yellow rays over the bushes and the ground, absolutely a shower of gold,” though he expressed disappointment in the canvas. This picture has been through as tumultuous a life journey as its maker, but it stands out not only for the beauty of the sunset, but also for the dancing trees and flowers.

Surprise: As the AP reports, one owner of this picture—having been informed by France’s ambassador to Sweden that it was a fake—banished it embarrassedly to an attic. By 1991, the Van Gogh Museum itself decided not to authenticate it. The son of a preacher, Van Gogh, who had several deeply religious spells during his life, would have appreciated this canvas’s impersonation of Isaiah 53:3, “[It] is despised and rejected … despised, and we esteemed [it] not.”

Fabergé figure of a Cossack Bodyguard (1912)

Time lost: 1934–2013 (79 years)

Found: In an Upstate New York attic

Why it’s a treasure: The sapphire eyes alone are a marvelous feat, and a Fabergé specialist (under the seller’s employ) fawned to the Times: “The expression in the face—nobody can do that these days.” Per Stair Galleries, Fabergé figures are “on a level of rarity with the imperial Easter eggs.” Fabergé likely made just 50 “hardstone” (semi-precious or gemstone) human figures.

Surprise: Stair set a record selling the seven-inch-tall figure for $5.2 million well above the $500,000 to $800,000 estimate. That a royal bodyguard was able to keep himself safe in a Rhinebeck, New York, attic for nearly 80 years isn’t entirely unexpected, but his discovery in his original box, so easily and extensively documented, is rare indeed. One point per decade lost.

Judith Beheading Holofernes (ca. 1607)
Caravaggio

Time lost: 1689–2014 (325 years, at least 100 in an attic)

Found: By a Toulouse auctioneer, “leaning against a wall in a dark, cluttered, leaky attic”

Why it’s a treasure: If this work is really by Caravaggio’s hand, it is clearly a treasure. No one paints figures in dramatic light quite like he. The violent scene appears in some redactions of the Old Testament but not others. Form here follows content, as experts disagree on its authenticity.

Surprise: “It’s incredible, but it’s true,” auctioneer Marc Labarbe told CNN. “There are only 65 of his paintings in the world, and I found the 66th painting in an attic.” The “dusty, water-stained” canvas was predicted to bring in some $171 million at auction, before selling pre-auction under mysterious circumstances. (The buyer was unmasked.) By another strange coincidence—its journey being “the stuff of a Dan Brown novel”—burglars passed on taking the canvas a few years before its rediscovery. History may yet exonerate their taste.

By Eileen Treasure