Gertrude Abercrombie Painting Bought for $30 Could Fetch $250,000 at Auction

A long-lost Gertrude Abercrombie painting, Alderman Merriam’s Shells (1951), was discovered hanging in a dark hallway during an estate sale in Michigan and purchased for just $30. The buyer, initially unaware of its significance, took the work to the Milwaukee Art Museum, where a retrospective of Abercrombie was on view. A historical photograph in the exhibition catalogue, originally published in 1952 in the Chicago Review for a show at Newman Brown Gallery, allowed experts to connect the newly found canvas to the missing work. Susan Weininger, a leading Abercrombie scholar, later confirmed its authenticity. The painting has now been consigned to Freeman’s, which will offer it in October with an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000 and an opening bid of $75,000. The composition features nine shells delicately rendered against a black background, one suspended by a string, creating the eerie, silent atmosphere typical of Abercrombie’s work. According to the auction house, the shells belonged to Robert Merriam, a Hyde Park alderman in Chicago, where Abercrombie lived and worked. Zachary Wirsum, senior vice president and head of Freeman’s postwar and contemporary art department, noted the irony: during the Milwaukee exhibition, he had told visitors that Abercrombie works occasionally surface at estate sales, never expecting one to appear less than a month later. The sale will test the market for a painting bought for $30 that could now achieve hundreds of times that amount.