5 Valuable Paintings People Accidentally Used as Simple Home Decor
The funny thing about visual art is that, although certain artists are considered geniuses and others complete hacks, actual enjoyment comes down to personal preference. Sure, learning more about the history or provenance of a particular piece might build or increase appreciation. But when it comes down to it, it doesn’t take much more than a glance to know whether a piece of art lights up the pleasure receptors of your personal brain.
Sometimes, this can lead to a garage sale dime-a-dozen portrait that, for whatever reason, sticks with you. It can also mean that a piece of art you really love can come from a genuine appreciation, even without knowing if it’s important or not. In very lucky cases, other people won’t know it’s important either, and you’ll end up with a seminal work worth multiple millions for a song.
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Here are five incredibly valuable paintings someone was displaying, none the wiser…
Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth: $1.25 Million
An Indiana man picked up a painting as an inexpensive way to cover a hole in his wall. If he’d known how much the still life he bought was really worth, he could have sold it and bought a whole new house. He only realized the painting, then relegated to the attic, might be worth something when he saw the similarities to painter Martin Johnson Heade’s work in a board game called Masterpiece. The similarities turned out to be anything but a coincidence, and the painting sold for $1.25 million to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Buste de femme Dora Maar: $6 Million
It seems pretty unbelievable that any painting with the name of one of the most famous painters of all time scrawled in the corner would go unnoticed. Somehow, though, that was the fate of Buste de femme Dora Maar. Junk dealer Luigi Lo Rosso bought the painting in 1962, stuck it in a cheap frame and hung it up, to the chagrin of his wife. She called it “horrible,” but when they later found it was valued at 6 million euros, I bet she felt much more appreciative.
Christ Mocked: $26.8 Million
For years, a 90-year-old French woman cooked beneath the painting above. To her, it was just another bit of religious iconography to stick in her kitchen. Eventually, she was moving and deemed the painting unworthy of coming with, but had it appraised on her family’s suggestion. That’s when she discovered that she’d made thousands of dinners beneath Christ Mocked, one of only 15 known works by the 13th century painter Cimabue.
It went to auction in 2019, and when the gavel struck, her stalwart kitchen decor had sold for $26.8 million.
The Virgin and Child with a Flower on a Grassy Bank: $50 Million
This one is especially heinous given that the people who sold it for a measly $30 had been told its value already. Unfortunately, they thought their father was lying about the sketch being an original by Albrecht Durer. A buyer, who was told it was nothing more than a reproduction, picked it up regardless and was rewarded for his choice, to the tune of $50 million.
Woman-Ochre: $100 Million
One painting by Willem de Kooning made its way through a surprising amount of unknowing hands, ones that apparently never followed art-theft news in the year 1985. That was the year the painting was stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art.
It disappeared for a while, before eventually resurfacing as an unrecognized bit of interior decoration. Antique store owners noticed it hanging in the house of a recently deceased woman, and bought it purely out of visual interest. It was only once they’d put it up in their store that a customer mentioned it looked like a De Kooning, and for good reason — it was Woman-Ochre, a painting that was worth exponentially more than the house it was hung in at $160 million.