A $30 estate sale find could sell for $250,000

A collector who arrived late to a Michigan estate sale this July, after most of the goods had been picked over, wandered into a hallway leading to the garage and found a slate-gray painting of scattered seashells. The lower-left corner read: Abercrombie, '51. The price was $30. The painting turned out to be a long-lost work by Gertrude Abercrombie, the Chicago Surrealist once called the "Queen of Chicago," and Freeman's expects it to sell for up to $250,000 in New York on October 1. The buyer made a detour on a family vacation to an Abercrombie retrospective in Milwaukee, where the exhibition catalog held an archival photo of the very painting. Art historian Susan Weininger authenticated it. Abercrombie had given the piece to a Kalamazoo doctor in exchange for a medical procedure, and it stayed in his family for 75 years. Weeks earlier, a Freeman's specialist had told tour visitors that her paintings still turn up at estate sales now and then. He was right sooner than he expected.