$30 Estate Sale Abercrombie Smashes Record at $1.3m

A painting bought for $30 at a Michigan estate sale sold for a record $1.3 million at Freeman's, setting a new auction high for Gertrude Abercrombie.

Alderman Merriam's Shells (1951), an 8-by-11-inch painting by Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–77), sold on Thursday, October 1 at Freeman's auction house in New York for $1.3 million, including buyer's premium — a new world auction record for the artist, as both The Art Newspaper and citybiz report. The work had been bought for just $30 at an estate sale in Michigan last summer. Freeman's gave it a presale estimate of $150,000 to $200,000, and it blew well past the high end. Auctioneer David Weiss, a Freeman's senior vice president, opened bidding with the line The Art Newspaper quotes: "Keep going to those estate sales." The auction house itself called it "the little painting that could."

The scale of the upset is what makes the story remarkable. The Art Newspaper notes the low end of the estimate alone was 5,000 times what the estate-sale buyer paid. Both outlets, citing the data site Arthur Analytics, report the result beats Abercrombie's previous record of about $1 million, set by Message for Mercy (1950) at Sotheby's in New York last November — a jump of roughly 33% in under a year. As recently as early 2025, the artist's secondary-market high stood at $864,000, meaning her record has climbed steeply in a short period. Both sources caution that the premium-inclusive price is not the consignor's net take-home, but the outcome for the lucky picker is nonetheless extraordinary.

The painting's provenance is as unusual as its price. Abercrombie traded the work to a Kalamazoo, Michigan doctor named John Reynolds in exchange for unspecified surgical services, a transaction The Art Newspaper reports was confirmed as far back as the early 1980s by the artist's expert Susan Weininger. Reynolds was the only owner, lent it to several important museum shows, and the work eventually vanished into his estate. citybiz and The Art Newspaper both describe how Zack Wirsum, Freeman's head of post-war and contemporary art, received an email over the July Fourth weekend while preparing for a family hike in Arkansas. The Art Newspaper quotes him saying he was "gobsmacked" — "one I had never seen."

Both outlets frame the result as the payoff of a decades-long curatorial revival for an artist who lacked gallery representation in her lifetime — some works were sold through department stores including Marshall Field's — while she built a devoted regional following in Chicago's Hyde Park, befriending jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. citybiz and The Art Newspaper credit a 2018 show at New York's Karma gallery, organized by curator Dan Nadel, followed by an acclaimed exhibition at the Elmhurst Art Museum organized by Jenny Gibbs. After the sale, Wirsum said in a statement quoted by The Art Newspaper: "No fairytale would be complete without a storybook ending... as happily ever after as it gets."