In 2025, a man attending an estate sale at the home of a deceased doctor in Michigan came upon a painting languishing in a dimly-lit corridor leading to the garage — and it turned out to be Gertrude Abercrombie’s lost 1951 masterpiece, Alderman Merriam’s Shells.
When a collector was browsing the offerings at a picked-over estate sale in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 2025, he ended up coming across an interesting looking painting and bought it for $30. Since identified as a 1951 work from American surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie entitled Alderman Merriam’s Shells, that painting, just sold at auction for $1.3 million.
Not only did this figure wildly surpass the auction house’s pre-sale estimate of $200,000, it also represents a record-breaking price for the work of Abercrombie, whose reputation in the global art world has grown immeasurably over the last decade…