A small painting of ten seashells was sitting in a dark corner of a hallway at a Michigan estate sale this July. Every other shopper walked right past it. One buyer, a longtime hunter of record albums and midcentury furniture, spotted it and paid $30.

On October 1, that same little canvas sold at auction in New York for more than $1.35 million.

The Chicago Sun-Times has the full story of how a thirty dollar impulse buy turned into a record for one of Chicago’s best loved painters.

He Bent The Family Vacation To Chase A Hunch About Those Shells

The painting is called “Alderman Merriam’s Shells,” and it dates to 1951. It is only 8 by 11 inches, oil on canvas, and the signature reading “Abercrombie, ’51” was barely visible against the dark background.

After some quick research, the buyer decided the name might matter. So he changed the plans for a family vacation and drove to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which was showing a touring retrospective of the artist, Gertrude Abercrombie.

Inside the exhibition catalog he found a photo of his painting. It sat beside a 1952 Chicago Tribune review of her show at the Newman Brown Gallery, with the real shells that she had painted posed right next to it.

That was the moment a hallway bargain became a serious find.

A Kalamazoo Doctor Got It In Trade For Medical Services

The trail back was just as colorful. Abercrombie never sold this one. She traded it to a doctor in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in exchange for medical care, and it stayed in his family’s hands until his estate was sold off.

Before that, the picture had been shown at six of her solo exhibitions over two years, with a price between $50 and $150 on it.

Art history professor Susan Weininger of Roosevelt University, an Abercrombie expert, authenticated the work. Conservator Julian Baumgartner then cleaned off the grime and clouded varnish, and found the painting underneath in excellent shape and still wearing its original frame.

Experts Hoped For $250,000 And Bidders Went Four Times Higher

Freeman’s in Philadelphia handled the sale. The presale estimate was $150,000 to $250,000, and the bidding left that range far behind.

The hammer price was $1,060,000. After the buyer’s premium, the fee the auction house adds on top, the total came to $1,352,600.

It was the first Abercrombie ever to pass the million dollar mark at auction. The old record was $1.02 million, set by “Message for Mercy” at Sotheby’s in 2025.

Zachary Wirsum, a senior vice president at Freeman’s, summed up the mood by saying “the spooky sky is the limit” for her prices.

Her Paintings Sat In Thrift Stores Until The Early 2000s

Abercrombie lived from 1909 to 1977 and spent most of her life in Chicago. She was a Texas native and the daughter of opera singers, and her Hyde Park home was famous for jam sessions.

Dizzy Gillespie played at her wedding to music critic Frank Sandiford in 1948. Sonny Rollins and Max Roach were among the musicians who dropped in at the house.

She painted owls, cats, doorways and shells, and she described her pictures as self portraits. Yet she sold mostly through art fairs and a gallery at Marshall Field’s, and she got little national attention while she was alive.

Her work was still turning up in thrift stores until the early 2000s. Collectors have chased it hard ever since.

How To Look At A Painting Before You Walk Away From It

You do not need a degree to learn from this story. You only need patience and a few habits that work at any estate sale, garage sale or thrift shop.

• Check the corners and hallways. The best finds are often leaning against a wall or sitting in a spot most people skip.
• Look for a signature, even a faint one, and check the back for gallery labels, stickers, handwritten notes or exhibition tags.
• Take a photo and search the artist’s name along with words like “auction results” before you decide.
• Leave the frame alone. An original frame and original surface are part of the value, and cleaning it yourself can cost you money.
• Look up sold prices, not asking prices. Asking prices are wishes, while sold prices are history.

If you do believe you have something special, an auction house specialist or a qualified appraiser can tell you whether it is worth a closer look. Most houses will give a first opinion from photos.

Remember too that the buyer in this story did homework for weeks and even rerouted a vacation. Luck put the painting in the hallway, but the research is what made it $1.35 million.

Next time you wander through an estate sale, take a second pass through the rooms everyone else skips. You may be standing next to a seashell painting of your own.

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