It was just after sunrise on a June morning. “Nicolo, ” whose real name cannot be exposed to the public because of Italy’s privacy laws, finished working the whole night at a factory in Turin. As he often did, he stopped by the “after work auction(拍卖)” run by the Italian police where things found on the trains were sold to the highest bidder. There, among many other things, Nicolo spotted two paintings he thought would look nice above his dining room table. Nicolo and another bidder battled until Nicolo finally won the paintings for $32.
When Nicolo retired and went to live in Sicily, he brought the paintings with him. He hung them above the same table he had moved from Turin. His son, age 15, who had taken an art appreciation class, thought that there was something unusual about the one with a young girl sitting on a garden chair. It was signed (签名) “Bonnato” or so he thought, but when he researched it, he only found “Bonnard, ” a French painter he had never heard of. He bought a book and was surprised to find a picture of the artist Pierre Bonnard sitting on the same chair in the same garden as his father’s painting.
“That’s the garden in our picture, ” Nicolo’s son told his father. They eventually learned that the painting they owned was called “The Girl with Two Chairs. ” They studied the other painting and learned that it was actually Paul Gauguin’s “Still Life of Fruit on a Table with a Small Dog. ” The family called the Italian Culture Ministry; the official confirmed that the paintings were originals and worth as much as $50 million.
