This is the stuff of (a junk collector's) dream: In 2017, while looking for a picture frame, an American woman came across a painting at a thrift store in Manchester, New Hampshire, which she then bought for $4. First she hung it up in her bedroom, then tucked it away in a closet. It only caught her eye again earlier this year and she decided to find out more about it.
After initial research was unsuccessful, she posted pictures of her find in the Facebook group "Things Found in Walls", where restorer Lauren Lewis noticed it and contacted her. "We had a long phone conversation and it dawned on me that she really had no idea what she was dealing with," Lewis told Insider magazine.
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But what was she dealing with? In fact, the painting is a work by the American painter and eminent illustrator Newell Convers (NC) Wyeth (1882-1945) and was thought to have been lost for over 80 years. The painting is one of four original illustrations by Wyeth for a 1939 edition of the novel Ramona (1884) by the American writer Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), which, like her non-fiction book A Century of Dishonor (1881) details the US government's treatment of Native Americans.
Driven by dramatic lighting, Wyeth's painting depicts a scene of confrontation between the titular heroine, Ramona, a partially Native American resident of California in the post-Mexican-American War (1846-48) era, and her domineering foster mother, Señora Gonzaga Moreno.
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Because Wyeth's original painting was used as an illustration in the 1939 edition of Ramona, art historians and other experts were aware of it, but did not know where it had gone. It was not uncommon for publishers to give away the originals after publication, Lewis explained, as they no longer had any value.
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It will probably never be known how the painting ended up in the junk shop. It will be offered for sale at Bonhams Skinner's American Art auction in Boston, Massachusetts on September 19 with an estimate of $150,000-$250,000.
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