{"id":101942,"date":"2025-07-29T11:29:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T11:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/101942\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T11:29:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T11:29:09","slug":"salvador-dali-painting-bought-for-150-at-house-clearance-sale-valued-at-20-30000-salvador-dali","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/101942\/","title":{"rendered":"Salvador Dal\u00ed painting bought for \u00a3150 at house clearance sale valued at \u00a320-30,000 | Salvador Dal\u00ed"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is not a painting that screams it is a masterpiece by Salvador Dal\u00ed<\/a> to the untrained eye.<\/p>\n

So when the unusual picture went up for auction in a house clearance sale in Cambridge two years ago, it attracted only two bidders \u2013 and sold for \u00a3150.<\/p>\n

Now, it has been valued at \u00a320,000 to \u00a330,000 after it was confirmed to be an illustration of an \u201cold sultan\u201d that Dal\u00ed painted in 1966.<\/p>\n

Vecchio Sultano, a mixed media artwork made with watercolour paint and felt-tip, is an illustration of a scene from The Arabian Nights \u2013 one of 500 illustrations the great surrealist artist intended to create of the Middle Eastern folktales.<\/p>\n

The painting was said to have been stored in a garage in a London home. Photograph: Cheffins\/Cambridge<\/p>\n

\u201cDal\u00ed was quite obsessed with Moorish culture and believed himself to be from a Moorish line,\u201d said Gabrielle Downie, a fine art specialist at Cheffins in Cambridge<\/a>, which is selling the Dal\u00ed artwork on 23 October.<\/p>\n

Dal\u00ed\u2019s patrons, Giuseppe and Mara Albaretto, commissioned the illustrations and Rizzoli, an Italian publishing house, was planning to publish them. But Dal\u00ed abandoned the project after completing just 100 of the 500 illustrations \u2013 leaving all of them unpublished.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf these 100 illustrations, half remained with the publishing house Rizzoli and were either damaged or lost, while the other 50 stayed with the Albarettos and were later inherited by their daughter, Christina \u2013 who was also Dal\u00ed\u2019s goddaughter,\u201d said Downie.<\/p>\n

The 50 illustrations retained by the Albaretto family were finally published in 2014, reigniting interest in the abandoned project and raising intrigue over the whereabouts of the unpublished pieces.<\/p>\n

A Salvador Dali exhibition in Nice this summer. Vecchio Sultano is quite different in style to most of the artist\u2019s work. Photograph: S\u00e9bastien Nogier\/EPA<\/p>\n

However, the Cambridge-based antiques dealer John Russell (not his real name), 60, was unaware of this two years ago when he snapped up Vecchio Sultano at a house clearance sale after spotting Dal\u00ed\u2019s signature in the bottom right corner.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe auction isn\u2019t online, so you turn up, view, and whatever you see, [that] is your chance to discover a treasure,\u201d he said. \u201cMost of the time, I buy stuff that I like. On this occasion, I was really taking a bit of a punt, because I wasn\u2019t sure I\u2019d have it on the wall, to be honest \u2026 I do like some unusual art, but you\u2019d have to love it, wouldn\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n

He was told the painting had been found in the garage of a London house and could barely contain his excitement when he saw stickers on the back, indicating it had been listed in a Sotheby\u2019s auction in the 1990s. \u201cI did a little bit of research and I couldn\u2019t believe what I was looking at.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nicolas Descharnes, a expert on Dal\u00ed, certifies the painting as authentic. Photograph: Cheffins\/Cambridge<\/p>\n

Russell decided to bid for it \u201con the spur of the moment\u201d, gambling on his ability to spot a fake after spending years avidly watching the BBC TV show Fake or Fortune. \u201cIt\u2019s one of my favourite programmes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The painting, which depicts a bejewelled sultan, did not command widespread admiration: despite being described as an original painting by Dal\u00ed, the vendors \u201chadn\u2019t even listed it with a reserve [price]\u201d, he said, and \u201cthere was no interest in the room\u201d from other dealers Russell knew. One person bid against him during the auction \u2013 and dropped out when Russell offered \u00a3150.<\/p>\n

A few months later, via eBay in the US, he tracked down the relevant Sotheby\u2019s sale catalogue, which listed the 38cm x 29cm painting and demonstrated it <\/strong>had been previously identified as Dal\u00ed\u2019s work and asked Cheffins to value it.<\/p>\n

Cheffins consulted the renowned Dal\u00ed expert Nicolas Descharnes, who certified the painting as authentic. He told the Guardian the style, subject and colours of the illustration matched those of other pieces in the series, along with the quality and size of the paper.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople expect to see very surrealist pieces by Dal\u00ed. This one is not surrealist, but it\u2019s a Dal\u00ed,\u201d Descharnes said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is not a painting that screams it is a masterpiece by Salvador Dal\u00ed to the untrained eye.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":101943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-101942","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114936293900082185","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}