A New Jersey family made some fast money recently when they were cleaning out their basement.
The Landau’s said the painting originally belonged to their grandparents until there death when their mother decided to hang it in the dining room. Something a number of the kids didn’t care for, since the image is of a woman passed out and being revived with smelling salts. It just doesn’t say “bon appetite!”
In 2010 their mother passed and the painting went down into a basement and under a ping pong table. Fast forward to 2017 and the family decides to auction off some of the things inherited from mom that were just gathering dust.
rothers Ned and Steven Landau took the artwork in 2015 to Nye & Company Auctioneers in Bloomfield, where they were initially told it might fetch around $500.
John Nye, of Nye & Company, put what appeared to be an unsigned copy of the Rembrandt painting up for auction.
“Everybody was caught by surprise. There were only three people in the world that recognized the significance of the painting, and they were all in Europe,” the auctioneer said.
When the auction was over the painting had sold for $1.1 million! The winning bidder had the painting authenticated soon after to prove it was a real Rembrandt and then quickly sold it to a collector for $4.4 million.