A Canadian work of art that sold for $75,000 at auction Monday apparently surfaced at an antique shop in England, where a man bought it for a mere $50, a British newspaper is reporting.
The Daily Mail said the man, in the western English region of Devon, originally bought the picture for its oak frame and replaced the painting with another.
Then, he got curious. After going online and discovering the watercolour's creator, Walter Joseph Phillips, was an English-born Canadian artist of some renown, he took it to Bonhams auction house.
The painting, titled the Hoh-Hok Houseposts at Karlukwees, depicts a series of totem polls on the coast of British Columbia, and was originally estimated to be worth about $16,000. At auction Monday in Toronto, it sold for several times that.
"Our client observed the sale over the internet and we spoke to him afterwards and naturally he was delighted and over the moon with the sale," the paper quoted a Bonhams official as saying.
Mr. Phillips, who lived from 1884 to 1963, is known for his paintings and prints of the Canadian landscape and became associated with what is now the Banff Centre, which named a gallery after him.
It was not immediately clear how the painting, which is believed to have been created in the late 1920s, ended up in the antique shop.