Bought for $30 at an Estate Sale, This Long-Lost Gertrude Abercrombie Painting Could Now Fetch $250,000

The Chicago-based Surrealist created the piece in 1951, then gave it to a doctor in exchange for medical services

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

September 17, 2026 2:02 p.m.

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

In July, a treasure hunter arrived late to an estate sale in Michigan, after most of the goods had already been picked over. Undeterred, the collector decided to poke around anyway and, in a hallway leading to the garage, found a slate-gray painting depicting scattered seashells. In the painting’s lower-left corner, a name and date were visible: Abercrombie, ’51. 

Intrigued, the collector decided to take a chance that the work might be special and paid $30 for it. 

That ended up being a very good decision: The piece is a long-lost painting by a legendary Chicago-based Surrealist—and now it’s expected to sell for up to $250,000 at auction. Freeman’s will offer Alderman Merriam’s Shells during its upcoming Postwar & Contemporary Art sale in New York on October 1.

After purchasing the painting, the new owner made a detour on a family vacation to visit “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery,” a nationally touring Abercrombie retrospective then on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition catalog included an archival photograph of the painting in its original frame alongside the seashells it depicted. The image had been featured in a Chicago Tribune review of Abercrombie’s 1952 exhibition at Newman Brown Gallery.

Buoyed by the discovery, the owner asked Susan Weininger, an art historian at Roosevelt University who is considered a leading Abercrombie authority, to take a look at the painting. Upon its authentication, the artwork was entrusted to Freeman’s, a sponsor of the Milwaukee exhibition. 

Discovering Gertrude Abercrombie

Watch on

Weeks earlier, Zachary Wirsum, Freeman’s senior vice president and the head of its postwar and contemporary art department, had told visitors on an exhibition tour that Abercrombie paintings still occasionally turn up at estate sales. He couldn’t have imagined just how imminent the next discovery was. 

“Little did I know that one of those ‘once in a while’s would occur less than a month later,” he says in a statement. “We could not be more thrilled to now steward this magnificent rediscovery to the next chapter of its fascinating story.” 

Abercrombie painted the work in 1951, drawing inspiration from nine seashells owned by Robert Merriam, who served as the alderman of Chicago’s fifth ward from 1947 to 1955. Merriam’s ward included Hyde Park, the neighborhood where the artist lived and worked. Although Merriam was not part of Abercrombie’s inner circle, the two were acquainted. 

She regularly painted shells, often depicting single specimens with holes or cracks. Art historians long assumed she had invented these imperfections, but Alderman Merriam’s Shells suggests otherwise—because one of Merriam’s nautilus shells bore both a hole and a crack. 

For Abercrombie, shells became “personal emblems,” according to the auction listing. Throughout her career, she often painted spare and ascetic rooms, which seem to have represented her feelings of loneliness and insecurity; she also painted many tents, a “more precarious kind of enclosure.” 

“The shell is another kind of home, at once protective and confining, a contained space that may have also appealed to Abercrombie thematically,” per Freeman’s.

In 1952 and 1953, Alderman Merriam’s Shells appeared in several Abercrombie exhibitions in Chicago, New York and Milwaukee, priced at $50 to $150. The artist ultimately gave the piece to John Reynolds, a doctor in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in exchange for a medical procedure. It remained in Reynolds’ family for 75 years, until it was offered at this summer’s estate sale. 

Born in 1909 in Austin, Texas, Abercrombie spent much of her life in the Windy City, where she became known as the “Queen of Chicago.” At her Hyde Park brownstone, she hosted popular salons that drew fellow artists, literary figures and jazz musicians. Inspired by her dreams, she painted “pithy, surrealist scenes filled with solitary women, cats, luminous moons, fairytale towers and halls lined with colorful doors,” Katie White wrote for Artnet.

Abercrombie died in 1977, at age 68. In recent years, however, her work has enjoyed a renewed wave of attention. 

“I think people are especially attracted to the weirdness of her art, and just how personal and out there it was,” Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, curator of American art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, tells Smithsonian magazine’s Amy Crawford. 

Julian Baumgartner, who owns Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration in Chicago and cleaned Alderman Merriam’s Shells ahead of the auction, has noticed the same appeal. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever met somebody who has seen her work and not fallen in love with it,” he said in a video documenting the restoration process. “Either the charmingness or the weirdness or the comprehensive universe she built of language and symbols—it’s just really compelling.”

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.