AI Identifies a Historic Work, Turning a $100 Thrift Store Painting into a $254,000 Sale

Helen Plotkin bought a painting for less than $100 at a secondhand store in New York 60 years ago. Plotkin, who has a bachelor’s degree in art, fell in love with the painting, which showed a woman dressed in black, and it hung in her home until last December. But a simple search using artificial intelligence revealed that the painting was actually a valuable European artwork, according to a report in The New York Times. The painting was later authenticated by an art appraiser as an original work by the Scottish painter Francis Cadell, a member of the “Scottish Colourists,” and sold this month to a private buyer at auction for 189,200 pounds, or $254,000.

Stories about family heirlooms that turn out to be worth a fortune have long been fodder for various television programs in the United States. But Plotkin’s case is an example of another use for artificial intelligence, identifying objects that were once reserved for trained eyes alone. Plotkin, 88, said that although the painting caught her eye, she never suspected its true value. “I didn’t think about it at all, I just loved the painting.”

Plotkin’s son, Barry, 60, recalled that over the years there had been speculation in the house about the work’s origins, but it never led to a professional review by an auction house. A few months ago, during a visit to his mother’s home in Florida, an idea occurred to him, why not ask Gemini about the work’s provenance? He took a photo, uploaded it, and asked the chatbot what it could tell him about the painting. “It found a lot of information as soon as I sent it the picture,” the son said.

Gemini identified the orange brushstrokes in the painting, the Art Deco style aesthetics and the distinctive background as “clear” characteristics of Cadell’s work. It also noted the painter’s affiliation with the “Scottish Colourists,” a group of four artists, Cadell, John Duncan Fergusson, George Leslie Hunter and Samuel Peploe, who brought influences of Fauvism and French Impressionism into modern British art. “Your mother didn’t just find ‘a Cadell,’” Gemini wrote. “She found a large studio portrait from the 1920s, painted in his most famous studio in Edinburgh.”

Gemini directed Barry to check the back of the painting. They found an auction mark, a canvas stamp and a processing date. They then turned to an auction house and a professional art appraiser. The chatbot suggested the experts Nic Colquhoun and Alice Strang of Lyon & Turnbull.

“As the story developed, we became more and more excited,” Strang said in an interview. “Because this is the stuff auctioneers’ dreams are made of.”

Strang and Colquhoun confirmed much of what the artificial intelligence had claimed, with one significant difference, Gemini identified the sitter as Bessie Hamilton Don Wauchope, a regular Cadell model whose name is written on the back of the work. But Lyon & Turnbull determined that the model was May Easter, another model for the painter. The turban Easter wears in Plotkin’s painting also appears in Cadell’s Pink and Gold.

Further research and technical analysis, including examination under three types of light, confirmed Gemini’s findings. Strang said she had no explanation for the painting’s appearance in New York in 1966, just months after Christie’s in London sold it for 21 pounds, about $600 in today’s money. Strang and Colquhoun gave the painting the title Interior: The Lady in Black.