Shopping at a Virginia flea market, a woman bought a box lot of various items for less than $50. The shopper, who is opting to remain anonymous, wasn’t even interested in the small smudgy landscape. She was apparently drawn to the lot of goods by a doll. “She liked the look of the frame, and started tearing off the paper on the back, but her mum told her to stop,” because she noticed a 'Renoir' plaque on the painting.
Nonetheless, a fine-arts specialist (Anne Norton Craner) at the Potomack Company of Alexandria, Va., is sure it’s a Renoir and the painting, which has been valued between $75,000 and $100,000, is scheduled to be sold on Sept. 29.
Ms. Craner, who said the image is included in the catalogue raisonné,”Paysage Bords de Seine”, the definitive compilation of an artist’s work, looked up the cataloged work and learned it was purchased from the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in France in 1925 and later sold to Herbert May, the husband of Sadie A. May, a well-known collector in Maryland who donated many works to the Baltimore Museum of Art. The painting has what seems to be the gallery’s sticker on the back with a stock number, Ms. Craner said. She does not know how this Renoir might have found its way from the Mays’s collection to a box of junk at a Shenandoah Valley flea market.
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