Sixty years ago, Helene Plotkin was perusing a thrift store in White Plains, N.Y., when a painting nestled among several others caught her eye.
Plotkin, who has an undergraduate degree in art, found herself mesmerized by the artwork’s bursts of color and its bold brushwork, which evoked the Fauvist style she loved. In the painting, a woman dressed in black sits in a domestic setting dashed with bright blue and orange hues. Plotkin remembers paying less than $100 for it.
The painting hung on Plotkin’s wall until last December, when, with the help of artificial intelligence, she discovered that her decades-ago thrift find was, in fact, a relic of European art history.
Later verified by art appraisers as an original work by the acclaimed Scottish Colorist F.C.B. Cadell, Plotkin’s painting sold to a private buyer at auction this month for 189,200 pounds with fees, or roughly $254,000.
Stories of family heirlooms that turn out to be worth fortunes have long been fodder for television shows like “Antiques Roadshow” and “Pawn Stars.” Yet Plotkin’s path to profit suggests that A.I. may be able to provide the rank-and-file with the kind of object-identification services historically limited to the expertly trained human eye.
Plotkin, 88, had long sensed a “regal feeling” in Cadell’s portrait, imagining its subject as, say, a politician’s wife (the woman has always reminded Plotkin of Eleanor Roosevelt). But she never suspected that she owned a masterpiece worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“I never, never thought about it at all,” Plotkin said in a recent telephone interview, “other than I loved the painting.”
Plotkin’s son Barry, 60, recalled that throughout the years, even as his mother occasionally speculated about the artwork’s origins, her curiosity never went beyond passing remarks, nor did he feel the painting warranted an investigation. It would have been a hassle to transport it to an auction house, just to be turned away.
Then a few months ago, a thought struck Barry during a visit to his mother’s home in Florida: Why not try Gemini, Google’s A.I. assistant?
He snapped a photo, uploaded it and asked the chatbot what it could tell him about the painting.
“It was amazing how much information came out of that,” he said.
In some of Gemini’s early responses, it noted the painting’s orange accents, its Art Deco aesthetics and its lilac backdrop — all “unmistakably” characteristics of Cadell’s work. It also cited the painter’s affiliation with the Scottish Colorists, a group of four artists — Cadell, John Duncan Fergusson, George Leslie Hunter and Samuel John Peploe — who infused modern British art with Fauvist and French Impressionist flavors.
“Your mother didn’t just find a ‘Cadell,’” Gemini wrote, “she found a large-scale, 1920s studio portrait of his primary muse, painted in his most famous Edinburgh studio.”
On top of delivering that great news, Gemini directed Barry to consult the back of the painting. There, he and his mother found an auction marking, a canvas stamp and a processing date. Gemini recommended “next steps for verification,” including contacting an auction house and a professional art appraiser. The A.I. assistant suggested the specialists Nick Curnow and Alice Strang at Lyon & Turnbull.
“As the story unraveled, we just got more and more excited,” Strang said in an interview, “because this is the stuff of auctioneers’ dreams.”
Strang and Curnow confirmed much of what A.I. had maintained, with a key exception: Gemini had identified Cadell’s subject as Bethia Hamilton Don Wauchope, a frequent model of Cadell’s whose name is inscribed on the back of the work. But Lyon & Turnbull pinpointed the model as May Easter, another of the painter’s models. The turban that Easter wears in Plotkin’s painting she also wears in Cadell’s “Pink and Gold.” Both paintings were most likely made in the mid-1920s, Strang said.
Additional research and technical analysis — including inspection under three kinds of light — further confirmed Gemini’s findings.
Cadell was “an absolute master of the paintbrush,” Strang said, adding, “He says ‘I am Cadell’ over and over in these paintings.”
Strang said she could not explain how Cadell’s painting wound up in suburban New York in 1966, mere months after Christie’s in London had sold it for £21 (or some $600 today). Mirroring Cadell’s naming style, she and Curnow titled the painting “Interior: The Lady in Black.”
Strang could have attributed the painting to Cadell on its own, she said, though she acknowledged that without A.I.’s assistance, Plotkin’s son might never have come to the firm.
As for the hefty payout, Plotkin, who has taught art and been known to give away her own paintings, said she planned to let her sons have it. “I don’t want any,” she said. “It’s theirs.”
Her one hope is that the artwork’s buyer might occasionally display it publicly.
She imagined her grandchildren might come across it and say, “Oh, look, there’s Nana’s painting.”
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