A 17th-century Rembrandt painting recently caught a fair price at auction after it was discovered in the attic of a home in Maine, the auctioneers shared on Wednesday.
The “Portrait of a Girl” was auctioned by Thomaston Place Auction Galleries during its annual Summer Grandeur sale, where it sold for $1.4 million on Aug. 24 to an unnamed European collector.
“Out of all the phone bids I’ve handled, I never imagined I’d help close a deal for over a million dollars,” Zebulon Casperson, a spokesperson for the winning bidder, said in a statement released by the gallery. “It feels like a shared victory.”
The founder of the auction house, Kaja Veilleux, said the painting was found during a routine appraisal visit to a private estate in Camden, Maine. The auction house shared that it was a “once-in-a-lifetime discovery.”
“We often go in blind on house calls, not knowing what we’ll find,” Veilleux said in a statement from the gallery.
Luckily, the painting was one of several heirlooms and antiques tucked away in the home’s attic, the gallery noted.
The painter, Dutch master Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, known as an artist by only his first name, created his art pieces in the 1600s. The “Portrait of a Girl” was found on a cradled oak panel and encased in a hand-carved frame.
A label on the work showed it was loaned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1970 by the owner at the time, Cary W. Bok.
Bok died in 1970 and worked as the treasurer and senior vice president of the Curtis Publishing Company, according to a New York Times obituary.