Grandma's old painting sells for $600,000

I love stories like this. A woman hoping to raise a little money to pay her daughter's college tuition decided to sell a few things she'd inherited from her Italian grandmother. One of these items, a painting the woman had been storing in her garage, sold for over $600,000 due to speculation that it might have been done by the Italian old master Pier Francesco Mola.

The woman had no idea. For her, it was like winning the lottery.

Aside from the heartwarming story of a regular person striking it rich unexpectedly, a couple of things are interesting about this. First, the auction house the woman used, Harvey Clars in Oakland, California, is not the sort of place one would expect an item like this to be sold. It's a reputable and well-established house but it doesn't typically have the privilege of offering six-figure paintings. In fact, the piece was the most valuable thing Clars had ever sold. It was as much a windfall for the auction house as it was for the owner.

More shocking is the fact that the sale price was fueled entirely by speculation. The auction house employees figured the unsigned painting might have been done by one of the Italian old masters, but they didn't guess it was by Mola. They didn't make any claims or give any hints about its authorship and started the bidding at $5,000. When the price was driven up to the six-figure range by telephone bids from bidders in France and New York, the auctioneer was as surprised as everyone else. The painting has not been authenticated or even inspected by Mola experts, and no one can be sure whether it is really by the artist. The anonymous New York-based buyer is taking a big chance, especially considering that no bona fide painting by Mola has ever sold for more than $2.8 million.

One can only wonder what might have happened if the woman had taken the painting to Christies or Sotheby's and someone had identified it as a possible Mola before putting it on the block. Would it have attracted higher bids? Who can say?

The whole thing unfolded in a very similar way to my own ill-fated and regrettable eBay auction for the infamous fake Diebenkorn. I put the painting up for auction, showed some pictures of it, and made no claims about who may have painted it. Diebenkorn aficionados spotted it and decided to speculate. In my case, of course, I knew the painting was fake and I was hoping to attract speculation by playing dumb. But the mechanics of auction house art speculation work the same way on eBay as they do in the real world, and the end result of my auction was similar to that of the Mola: A very high bid was placed on a painting that carried no guarantee of authenticity. Sometimes bidding wars can be fueled by the naiveté - or perceived naiveté - of the seller, as much or more so than rock-solid assurances.