We’ll take what’s behind door number one!
While it sounds like something out of the classic TV game show “Let’s Make a Deal,” one lucky family in the north of France hit an $845,000 jackpot with what has been sitting behind a door of their home since 1900.
An extraordinary painting by the 17th-century artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger, which was unwittingly thought to be a copy by the family that owned it, sold for $845,000 at auction in Paris at the end of March. It is believed the 3 ¾-foot high and 6-foot-wide painting was created between 1615 and 1617 and is a version of L’Avocat du village (the Village Lawyer), a common theme for Brueghel.
The painting hung in a small, dimly lit TV room when it was discovered by chance last December by a visitor. An art expert told the family that what they had hanging absent-mindedly in the home for more than a century was an “exceptional” piece of art. The recent auction results confirmed the evaluation.
The family, who wished to remain anonymous, acquired the work in 1900, and had always called it lovingly “The Brueghel,” thinking it was fake. Malo de Lussac of the auctioneers Daguerre Val de Loire, who found the painting, said he could hardly believe what he had stumbled across.
“The family … had no idea it was a real. They thought it was a copy; just a bit of decoration that wasn’t worth very much,” De Lussac said.
“When we sent it to Germany for expert verification that confirmed it was a Brueghel and they understood the importance of what they had, they asked us to take a photograph of them in front of the painting that they had lived with for all those years. It was both funny and touching.”
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