Suzie Foote was walking her dog during the pandemic when she happened to notice numerous black garbage bags piled in front of a house in her neighborhood in Jackson.
“I’m not the least bit shy,” she said. “The bags were open. There were exquisite gold leaf frames in them.”
The bags, which looked unusually tidy, led Foote to an unexpected gift: A 19th Century European painting that would end up in a live auction in New York and pay for a trip overseas.
On the morning Foote discovered the black bags filled with frames, she returned in her vehicle to collect her finds, thinking she could drop them off at the Real McCoy Thrift Store & Boutique for its benefit.
She learned the frames were being discarded because the homeowner was moving to California and her son was cleaning out the contents of the house.
Thanks to a next-to-neighbor with whom she was friends, Foote made the acquaintance of the son and ended up dropping additional items he didn’t plan to move at the thrift store.
“I filled my car three times,” said Foote, both a board member of the Real McCoy House that helps women get back on their feet after recovery from addiction, and a volunteer at its thrift shop.
During one visit to the house being emptied of its furnishings, Foote inquired about a moody painting of Cairo, Egypt that caught her attention and discovered it was destined for California.
About a week later, Foote learned the painting had been left behind as a gift and was hers. Finding the perfect location to display it in her home proved difficult, however.
“I hung it in the foyer then moved it to a bedroom and then my office,” she said. “I decided as much as I loved it, it was too big and too heavy.”
Foote dropped the painting off at a local store that accepts items on consignment, thinking she might receive $500 for it. Several weeks later, the owner called to tell her he had researched the painting and suggested she get it appraised.
She did just that during a Beautiful Table Settings event in Vicksburg that included Justin Peters, a certified art appraiser from Enterprise, Ala.
“You could take something and have it appraised for free,” said Foote, who emailed Peters a photo of the painting before the event so he could research it.
He determined Charles-Theodore Frere (1814-1888) painted the work entitled “The Ismailia Canal, Cairo.” A chipped golf leaf frame with Arabic writing around its border enclosed the oil on panel, which measures about 13-x-16-inches.
Frere, a French artist who traveled to Algeria, Egypt, Greece, Turkey and Syria, probably painted the work between 1850 and 1880, Peters said.
Called up on stage to present her painting during the Vicksburg event, Foote learned from Peters that the frame itself could bring as much as $3,000 and the painting five or six times that amount.
“Being an art appraiser, you can spot something good a mile away,” he said. “Once every few years you find something like this. It was a cool find for sure.”
Foote asked Peters to represent her and broker a deal for the painting to be sold by Sotheby’s, a top auction house.
Peters estimated the painting’s worth at $20,000 to $25,000 and Sotheby’s using photos, $20,000 to $30,000. After viewing the painting and assessing its condition, Sotheby’s knocked its estimate down to $12,000 to $18,000.
“The condition was not great,” Peters said. “It had not been taken care.”
The painting sold for $11,400 with a buyer’s premium, an additional fee that the winning bidder at an auction pays on top of the winning bid, on May 22 during a live auction at Sotheby’s.
The name of the buyer was not disclosed but Peters figures someone from the Middle East most likely purchased the painting since it is done in what’s known as the Orientalist style. “That genre of painting is popular in the Middle East,” he said.
After Sotheby’s took its fee and Peters his commission, Foote received a check for $7,000 on July 6. Until then, talk of the painting’s monetary value seemed like “pretend dollars,” she said.
Foote rewarded the staff of the retail store that suggested she get the painting appraised by taking them out to dinner. “They didn’t have to say anything,” she said.
She applied some of the proceeds toward a trip she and her granddaughter, Bella, age 14, a ninth grader at Clinton High School, took to Mykonos, an island in Greece, to attend a family member’s wedding in July. “It was a happy time,” Foote said.
The story of the painting that makes the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” ring true offers promise to anyone who dreams of discovering a treasure from the past that turns out to be valuable and provides an unexpected bit of financial good fortune.
“It gives everybody hope,” Peters said.
