From a box of baseball cards estimated to be worth three million dollars to a man who found an official copy of the Declaration of Independence worth over two million dollars, in today’s article, we take a look at 14 garage sale items that sold for millions.
14. Attic Owl Painting
Jane Cordery, an art teacher in Basingstoke, Hampshire, discovered the detailed bird portrait in her attic after attempting to clean the space for a plumber.
She’d never seen the ornate owl, but the painting’s intricate brushwork caught her eye, and she decided to e-mail a photograph of the find to Christie’s auction house.
The attic artwork hit Christie’s auction block, far outselling its estimated price. The winning bid was 951,050 dollars. Not quite a million dollars, but hey, still worthy of the list.
13. John Constable Painting
A lost painting, sold for 3,500 pounds as the work of a John Constable copycat, has been snapped up for a whopping 3.4 million pounds after it was revealed to be painted by the celebrated artist himself.
A collector snapped it up for 3,500 pounds in June of 2013, but after taking a closer look, they suspected the original artwork had been painted over.
Experts say the previously unknown painting is one of several preparatory sketches Constable did, before creating the masterpiece Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, which was bought by the Tate Gallery in 2014 for 23.1 million pounds.
12. Million-Dollar Cabinet
A long-lost 1.6-million-dollar 17th century cabinet was found outside the toilet of a pizza parlor in Yorkshire, England. At a Sotheby’s sale, after the carved wooden base was reunited with its intricately decorated top half, the cabinet, which features the picture of the pope blessing the crowd in Rome, was sold for 1,084,500 pounds, including the buyer’s premium.
11. Andy Warhol Original Sketch
Back in 2010, British businessman Andy Fields purchased a collection of five painting from a Las Vegas garage sale for 5 dollars. When he decided to have one of the paintings reframed, he discovered an early Andy Warhol sketch hidden behind it.
The signed drawing is believed to be of singer Rudy Vallee and was created when Warhol was just 10 years old. Warhol paintings fetch absurd prices on the auction block.
The artist is considered to be the bellwether of the art market and the sketch is estimated to be worth a whopping 2 million dollars.
10. Ansel Adams Negatives
Norsigian paid $45 for two boxes of glass plates in 2000. Attracted to the plates because they depicted Yosemite National Park, a place he has worked as a young man, Norsigian took the boxes away for the next two years.
After researching the plates, which turned to be photographic negatives, Norsigian became convinced that they had been captured by the father of American photography himself, Ansel Adams.
With the plates authenticated, Norsigian was shocked to learn the negatives could be worth upwards of two hundred million dollars.
9. Pablo Picasso Painting
Of all the places to stumble upon an original Picasso, who would guess that one would show up at a trailer park in Shreveport Louisiana? For Teisha McNeal, however, that probability became real, when in 2009, she paid Edith Parker 2 dollars for a painting purported to be fake that was signed by the master.
According to Parker, she kept looking at the picture and said, “Well, it don’t look like much and it was in this cheap little frame.” It was estimated that the painting was worth 2 million dollars.
8. Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth
The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston has paid 1.25 million dollars for a still-life painting that for years covered a hole in the wall in an Indiana home. It’s value unknown to the owner and its existence unknown to art experts.
The painting, Magnolias on gold velvet cloth by the 19th century American painter Martin Johnson Heade, was sold by a man in his 30s who works at a tool and die company.
He started to realize the value of the work in January when he played Masterpiece, a board game about art which includes an image of a similar Heade’s painting.
7. Declaration of Independence
In 1989, an unassuming analyst from Philadelphia, discovered a folded print of the Declaration of Independence stowed away beneath a faded oil painting.
Purchased for 4 dollars at a Pennsylvania’s flea market, a shrewd friend of the buyer encouraged the man to have the document appraised. As luck would have it, the tattered copy turned out to be one of only 500 official copies from the declarations first printing.
Of those 500 copies, only 23 were known to have survived the passing of the years. By the time the gavel dropped at Sotheby in 1991, the print had more than doubled its 1.2-million-dollar estimate and sold for an astounding 2.42 million dollars.
6. The Old Vase
A brother and sister in Pinner United Kingdom, cleaned out the house belonging to their deceased parents. They figured that this old vase that they found might be worth a few bucks, so they decided to have it appraised.
They took it to a local auctioneer, Bainbridges, who were in turn excited by the find, and valued it between 800,000 pounds and 1.2 million pounds.
However, nobody expected the reaction from Chinese buyers who pushed the bidding up for over 30 minutes to a world record 43 million pounds. The total price, including VAT on commission, was 53,105,000 pounds.
5. Mazarin Chest
In 2013, an Edo-era Japanese chest belonging to Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister of France from 1642 to 1661, was snapped up at an auction for 7.3 million euros by Rijks museum.
The black-and-gold lacquer chest, with silver and mother-of-pearl decorations, dates back to the start of Japan’s Edo period and was acquired by Mazarin in 1658. Auctioneer Philippe Rouillac found the chest and it had been used as a bar for the past two decades.
Photographs dating back to the late 19th century confirmed that it was one of four chests bought by Mazarin, a great art collector. Its starting price at auction was a mere 200,000 euros, but ended up fetching far more.
4. Jackson Pollock Painting
An abstract painting that retired truck driver, Teri Horton, bought from a southern California thrift store almost 30 years ago, may be an authentic Jackson Pollock creation.
Horton, who purchased the painting for five dollars, decided it was taking up too much space in her mobile home and offered it to a friend who was an art professor.
Shortly thereafter, Canadian forensic art expert, Peter Paul Biro, found one of Pollock’s fingerprints on the canvas and concluded it was real. The painting could be worth 50 million dollars. In 2006, one of them was sold for 140 million dollars.
3. Baseball Cards
Kissner was working with family members cleaning out his aunt’s house, a house previously owned by his grandfather, when his cousin, Karla Hench, ran across a green box with about 700 baseball cards packaged with twine.
He knew they looked a little different, they were the smaller, tobacco-style cards of the early 1900s. But with so much stuff to clean, he set them aside for a couple of weeks.
Once he had the time to go through the box, he realized that these cards of Hall of Famers Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Connie Mack might be worth something. They are estimated to be worth $3 million.
2. Imperial Faberge Egg
In 2004, an unidentified man purchased a golden egg at a flea market intending to sell it for its scrap value. He ended up holding on to it for ten years until it was discovered that the egg was one of the eight missing Imperial Faberge Eggs.
When he contacted Kieran McCarthy, an expert in Russian artifacts, who recounted that his spine was shivering as he estimated the egg’s value at nearly 30 million dollars.
1. The Bowl
An exceptionally rare 15th century porcelain bowl made in China that somehow turned up at a Connecticut yard sale and sold for just US$35 was auctioned off in March for nearly $722,000.
The experts estimated the bowl, which is shaped like a lotus bud and painted with cobalt-blue floral patterns, to be worth between $300,000 and $500,000.
But after a battle between four bidders at the Sotheby’s Important Chinese Art auction in New York, the bowl sold for $721,800, more than 20,000 times its asking price at the yard sale. And these are the 14 garage sale items that sold for millions.
