I love stories like this one:
Two lost paintings by Italian Renaissance master Fra Angelico have turned up in a modest house in central England in a discovery hailed as one of the most exciting art finds for a generation.
The works -- two panels each painted with the standing figure of a Dominican saint in tempera on a gold background -- are expected to fetch more than 1 million pounds at auction.
They were discovered behind a bedroom door in a terraced house in Oxford when art auctioneer Guy Schwinge was called in to carry out a valuation after the owner of the house. librarian Jean Preston, died in July.
I'm always curious how these things just end up in someone's attic or barn or behind a door. I love watching Cash in the Attic, a British show where people sell their stuff at antique sales. It always fascinates me what people can find at a car boot sale (garage sale) that fetches 100 times what the person paid for it. Now we've got masterpieces being left behind bedroom doors.
Media reports said Preston found the paintings in a box of odds and ends when she was working as a manuscript curator at a museum in Huntington, California, in the 1960s. She did not identify them but thought they were "quite nice" and persuaded her father to buy them for a few hundred pounds.
Dillian Gordon, curator of early Italian paintings at the National Gallery in London, described the find as "quite breathtaking".
"It never ceases to amaze me how these things come to light," she said in a statement.
Me either!
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