Bought for $30 at an Estate Sale, This Long-Lost Gertrude Abercrombie Painting Could Now Fetch $250,000

In July, a treasure hunter arrived late to an estate sale in Michigan, after most of the goods had already been picked over. Undeterred, the collector decided to poke around anyway and, in a hallway leading to the garage, found a slate-gray painting depicting scattered seashells. In the painting’s lower-left corner, a name and date were visible: Abercrombie, ’51.

Intrigued, the collector decided to take a chance that the work might be special and paid $30 for it. That ended up being a very good decision: The piece is a long-lost painting by a legendary Chicago-based Surrealist—and now it’s expected to sell for up to $250,000 at auction. Freeman’s will offer Alderman Merriam’s Shells during its upcoming Postwar & Contemporary Art sale in New York, on October 1.

After purchasing the painting, the new owner made a detour on a family vacation to visit “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery,” a nationally touring Abercrombie retrospective then on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition catalog included an archival photograph of the painting in its original frame alongside the seashells it depicted. The image had been featured in a Chicago Tribune review of Abercrombie’s 1952 exhibition at Newman Brown Gallery.

Buoyed by the discovery, the owner asked Susan Weininger, an art historian at Roosevelt University who is considered a leading Abercrombie authority, to take a look at the painting. Upon its authentication, the artwork was entrusted to Freeman’s, a sponsor of the Milwaukee exhibition. Weeks earlier, Zachary Wirsum, Freeman’s senior vice president and the head of its postwar and contemporary art department, had told visitors on an exhibition tour that Abercrombie paintings still occasionally turn up at estate sales.

He couldn’t have imagined just how imminent the next discovery was. Merriam’s ward included Hyde Park, the neighborhood where the artist lived and worked. Although Merriam was not part of Abercrombie’s inner circle, the two were acquainted.

She regularly painted shells, often depicting single specimens with holes or cracks. Art historians long assumed she had invented these imperfections, but Alderman Merriam’s Shells suggests otherwise—because one of Merriam’s nautilus shells bore both a hole and a crack. For Abercrombie, shells became “personal emblems,” according to the auction listing.