Flea market picker strikes gold as $30 Gertrude Abercrombie painting brings record $1.3m at auction
The painting, discovered in an estate sale in Michigan this summer, set a new auction record for Abercrombie at a Freeman’s sale in New York
A $30 painting found at a Michigan estate sale last summer has sold for $1.3 million at Freeman's auction house in New York on Thursday. The 8in-by-11in work, titled Alderman Merriam’s Shells (1951) by Gertrude Abercrombie, shattered both her previous auction record and the world auction record for the artist. Prior to this sale, Abercrombie's highest auction price was $1 million, achieved at Sotheby's in November 2024.
Freeman's senior vice president David Weiss encouraged flea market buyers to keep searching estate sales, as the $150,000 low end of the presale estimate was still five thousand times the price the buyer paid. Gertrude Abercrombie, a Chicago-based artist, had a peripatetic childhood and counted jazz musicians Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker as friends.
She traded the painting to doctor John Reynolds for surgical services. The painting spent decades in Reynolds' estate before Freeman's head of contemporary art Zack Wirsum saw an image of it while preparing for a family hike. Since then, interest in Abercrombie's work has surged, with exhibitions at renowned galleries like Karma in New York and Elmhurst Art Museum outside Chicago.
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