A MISTAKE by the Salvation Army saw a shopper make $135,000 after a brave purchase at his local thrift store.
Photographer Paul Beaty from Chicago visited the store in 2016 and took a chance by purchasing two famous paintings with his last remaining dollars.
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Beaty had found two originals of Warner Sallman’s 1940 painting The Head of Christ.
One was in chalk and the other was in oil, each on offer for just $125.
With only $300 in his account, the photographer haggled the price down to $100 each – a bargain for what he knew were originals.
When the tax was added on, the local photographer bagged the pair of three-foot-wide and four-foot-high paintings for $220.
“I walked in and couldn’t believe something like this would be in the Salvation Army,” he told Chicago-based PBS affiliate WTTW in 2018.
Beaty was correct, it was unbelievable because someone at the charity had made a mistake.
The paintings on display at the charity’s buildings in Minneapolis and Des Plaines since 1965 had gotten mixed up with store stock during an office move.
“We regret the oversight that led to a donated piece of art being purchased at a thrift store,” a spokesperson for the Salvation Army told the news outlet.
“We’d welcome the gift being returned to our collection.”
However, Beaty instead took two years to find a buyer after having his new art collection valued by Sallman expert Leroy Carlson.
“I knew they were originals from across the room, but I didn’t know how rare they were until I started Googling,” the proud new owner told the news outlet.
Carlson estimated that the oil painting was worth $100,000 and the chalk depiction was $35,000.
Jerry Jenkins, an author from Colorado, purchased the art pieces for $135,000 in 2018 after meeting Beaty and sharing his personal connection to the collection.
Jenkins had been a fan of Sallman’s work since he was a child and had long felt an affinity with his pieces.
This connection continued when he met his wife and discovered that her grandfather knew the artist as they had lived in the same building in Chicago and went to the same church.
“It just sort of seemed like destiny that we felt such a connection to the story and to the painting,” Jenkins told the news outlet following his purchase.
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Beaty proved people wrong by selling the artworks without a broker or auction house.
He also revealed how the sale marked the worth of other Sallman pieces especially the four other oil paintings of his Head of Christ.
“No original Warner Sallman (piece) had ever been sold, so a lot of people didn’t think it was worth that much,” Beaty explained.
“This sets the value of what an original Warner Sallman is worth now.”
Regarding the Salvation Army’s pleas to have the artwork returned, Jenkins said that he may later donate the chalk drawing to a Christian charity or the Salvation Army.
“They’re kind of the odd man out here,” he admitted.
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Credit Gist New Today News in Newspaper Nigeria Headlines
