Renoir Flea Market Find

Before I begin this post in the interest of full disclosure, I work with the fine people at the Potomack Company, assisting with furniture cataloging, appraisals and special projects.

At the next sale The Potomack Company will be offering a small oil painting by Renoir (see image) which was purchased at a flea market in the Shenandoah Valley as part of a boxed lot for about $50.00.

The painting, “Paysage Bords de Seine”, will be offered for sale at the Potomack Company in Alexandria, VA in the September 29th sale. The pre sale  estimate is between $75,000 and $100,000.

Below is a link to watch a video about the painting from a local Washington DC televsision station. It just goes to show that there are still some rare finds floating around the marketplace.  Even in a box of stuff at a flea market in the Shenandoah Valley.

http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/168977656.html

The NY Times is also covering the flea market find.  They report

Calling “Antiques Roadshow.” It was a Paul Bunyan doll that captured her eye, but the Virginia flea market buyer, who paid less than $50 for the box lot that held it, also purchased what could turn out to be a painting by the French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The Potomack Company, based in Alexandria, Va., is scheduled to auction off the small pastel-colored painting it believes is Renoir’s “Paysage Bords de Seine” on Sept. 29, and has valued it between $75,000 and $100,000. Anne Norton Craner, Potomack’s fine arts specialist and a former research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said she researched the 5.5-by-9-inch river scene and is convinced that Renoir painted it.

“You just see it and you know it’s right,” said Ms. Craner. The owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, brought the painting to Potomack in a large white plastic bag. “She liked the look of the frame, and started tearing off the paper on the back, and her mum told her to stop,” because it might be worth something, Ms. Craner recounted.

Ms. Craner, who said the image is included in the catalogue raisonné, the definitive compilation of an artist’s work, looked up the cataloged work and learned it was purchased from the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in France in 1925 and later sold to Herbert May, the husband of Sadie A. May, a well-known collector in Maryland who donated many works to the Baltimore Museum of Art. The painting has what seems to be the gallery’s sticker on the back with a stock number, Ms. Craner said. She does not know how this Renoir might have found its way from the Mays’s collection to a box of junk at a Shenandoah Valley flea market.

Of course, discovering forsaken masterpieces at out-of-the way flea markets is a time-tested ruse among art forgers, but Ms. Craner said she is confident that “Paysage Bords de Seine” is the real thing. As the owner told officials at Potomack after bringing them the painting, “It does pay to listen to your mother.”

Source: The NY Times