Painting bought for $30 in Michigan breaks a record: Gertrude Abercrombie’s “Alderman Merriam’s Shells” sells for $1.06 million

“Alderman Merriam’s Shells” (1951), a small 8-by-11-inch work in which nine shells are lined up in an ethereal landscape, sold on Thursday, October 1, at Freeman’s New York auction for $1,060,000 — the hammer price, without the buyer’s premium — setting a new auction record for the American surrealist artist Gertrude Abercrombie, as Artnet News reports.

The work had been bought in July for just $30 at a house sale in Michigan: a collector of vintage furniture and vinyl records noticed it in a hallway near the garage, hanging at an angle, identifiable only by the signature “abercrombie ’51” in the lower left-hand corner. At the end of the summer, browsing the catalogue of the retrospective “The Whole World Is a Mystery” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, he found an archival photograph of the same painting — published in a 1952 Chicago Tribune article about the artist’s exhibition at the Newman-Brown Gallery. Expert Susan Weininger authenticated the work as “Alderman Merriam’s Shells”, painted in 1951.

Archival research showed that Abercrombie had given the painting to Dr John Reynolds of Kalamazoo, Michigan, as payment for medical services; the work remained in his family and out of the public eye for 75 years. The Chicago artist, who never had gallery representation, often sold her works directly to friends or collectors.

The revival of her market began after the Karma gallery exhibition in 2018, which described her as a “critical, undervalued figure of mid-century American surrealism”: according to the Artnet Price Database, annual sales rose from under $75,000 before 2018 to over $3.5 million in recent years, while 80 works have sold for over $100,000. Last November, “Message for Mercy” (1950) was the artist’s first work to cross the $1 million threshold at Sotheby’s New York.

“Of course, we are thrilled beyond measure with the record result… What a return on a $30 investment!” commented Freeman’s senior vice president, Zachary Wirsum.