Rare painting bought for under $100 sells for more than $250,000 after AI identification
A former art teacher in New York turned a thrift-store purchase from 1966 into a major art-world discovery. Helen Plotkin bought a mysterious portrait in White Plains for less than $100 and hung it in her living room for nearly 60 years, never knowing who painted it. The work had a hard-to-read signature, but she was drawn to its strong colors, brushwork, and overall presence, and even thought the woman in the portrait resembled Eleanor Roosevelt.
The breakthrough came only at the end of 2025, when her son, Barry Plotkin, photographed the painting and uploaded it to Google Gemini. The AI suggested it may be by Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, or F.C.B. Cadell, one of the Scottish Colourists, and advised the family to check labels and markings on the back and consult art experts. That led them to Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh, where specialists Alice Strang and Nick Corno examined the work and confirmed it was by Cadell.
The painting was identified as Interior: The Lady in Black, and the sitter was named as May Easters. In early June 2026, it was sold at auction in Edinburgh for 189,200 pounds, about $254,000. The same work had reportedly sold at Christie’s in London in 1966 for just 21 pounds, and it is still unclear how it later ended up in a secondhand shop in suburban New York.
Beyond the sale price, the episode became an example of what AI can and cannot do in art attribution. Gemini helped point the family in the right direction, but the final confirmation came from human experts who studied the painting’s provenance, style, and historical context. Plotkin, now 88, said the picture had always been an admired part of her home, and she hoped the new owner would occasionally display it publicly so her grandchildren could see it again.
