This Filthy Barn Find Turned Out to Be a $7 Million Masterpiece

A once abandoned, dirt-covered painting turned out to be an unexpected masterpiece, selling for millions at a recent auction.

In 1998, George Wachter, chairman of Old Master paintings at Sotheby’s, heard about a painting found in a barn attic in Connecticut. "It was filthy, black, dirty," Wachter told Robb Report. "You could hardly see it."

The artwork, which was painted in 1666 by Dutch artist Frans Post, was titled "View of Olinda, Brazil, With Ruins of the Jesuit Church."

Despite its condition, Wachter convinced avid art collectors Jordan and Thomas Saunders to purchase the piece, believing a hidden treasure laid under the grime. He persuaded Saunders to buy the work for $2.2 million back in 1998. "I said, 'This is a killer,'" Wachter told Robb Report. "And so they trusted me because they couldn’t see it. It was jet black."

Nancy Krieg, the premier conservator of Dutch and Flemish paintings in New York, was hired to restore the art, which featured a unique pastoral scene.

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Last month, it sold for $6 million ($7.37 million with fees), a record for Post, whose previous auction record was $4.5 million at Sotheby’s in 1997. Before the sale, Sotheby’s had placed a $6 to $8 million estimate on the painting.

While most 17th-century Dutch artists concentrated on local landscapes, Post traveled to Brazil, which was a colony of the Netherlands at the time. As one of the few European-trained painters to specialize in the landscape of the Americas, he became a popular artist back home.

According to Sotheby's, while this painting isn't an exact topographical rendering of Olinda, Brazil, all of the individual elements, including the architectural ruins, wildlife, indigenous free and enslaved people, and Portuguese and Dutch settlers, reflect what Post saw during his time in Brazil. This imaginative approach allowed Post to create richer, more brilliant, and often larger compositions.

After being owned by various Parisians, the piece eventually ended up in someone's private collection in Connecticut. It’s unclear how or when it ended up in the barn though. Wachter told Robb Report that "it had probably been there 100 years."