the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.
At an estate sale in the early 1970s, I walked up to a table covered in old books, swept my eyes across it looking for the gold-stamped leather bindings that typified early editions, and instantly took in that all the volumes were 20th-century – except one, which I immediately picked up. It was The Song of Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; I opened it, and the publication date, 1855, matched the entry in my mental database. I bought it for 10 cents.
At another auction, I went through what must have been two dozen boxes of old books until my hands were so dusty it looked as if I were wearing tan leather gloves. At the bottom of the last box was one book bound in magnificent red Moroccan leather. I opened it without even looking for the title. The inner covers were lined with superb Florentine marbled end papers, and the pages were edged with gold leaf. It wasn’t just a first edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (1889); it was one of 250 presentation copies the publisher had printed, and tucked inside the back cover was an original Christmas card drawn by Dan Beard, Twain’s illustrator. This copy had evidently been given to Beard by Twain, although the book wasn’t autographed. I stuffed it back under the rest of the books it came with; we bought the entire box for $40 and gave all the other books away.
But vast preparation and expert pattern recognition were only half the battle; patience and stubbornness mattered at least as much.
We never assumed, on any buying expedition, that we wouldn’t find anything good enough to be worth owning. My dad often said, “If you don’t see anything good, you haven’t looked hard enough yet.”
He often took that principle to extremes. My dad was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known, but he did commit one cognitive error: the sunk-cost fallacy. He hated to come home from any expedition empty-handed and would often devote absurd amounts of effort to find something – anything – worth buying in order to “justify” the trip.
On one such wild goose chase, we had driven to a house in Schoharie, N.Y. for the preview of an estate auction. Everything in the house turned out to be junk at a glance: the pieces of Chippendale and Hepplewhite furniture that had looked enticing in the ad were reproductions, the pottery and porcelain was chipped and cracked, the rugs were tattered, the paintings were poor quality, and so on. My parents kept trudging from one room to another and up and down the staircase in endless loops of frustration, trying to find something worthwhile.
After all too many of these laps, I refused to waste any more energy and flopped down on a sofa in the dim and dingy living room; I was a teenage boy, after all. The upholstery expelled a musty puff of dust. I coughed and squinted my eyes shut. When I opened them, I found myself looking at the same hideous painting, propped up against the fireplace, that we and a couple hundred other treasure-seekers had already walked past almost a dozen times.
The auctioneers had retrieved it from the attic; the surface of the painting was so dirty it looked as if it had been varnished with a mix of caramel and coal dust. Some of the paint was peeling off the canvas in an upper corner. The picture had almost certainly been moldering in the attic for decades: Its giant gilded frame was chipped and cracked and almost black with dust. Mud wasps had built nests between the elaborate curlicues of the frame.
I was just bored enough to look at the painting just long enough to realize that something about it was bothering me.
Why would anybody put such an ugly painting into such an ornate picture frame?
The instant the idea came into my head, I stopped wondering when my parents would give up and started wondering about the painting. It was some kind of landscape. A few trees, some clouds, maybe a river – nothing else was discernible through the murk.
But the frame was huge and heavy and had once been beautiful.
No one, in a thrifty community of Dutch and Scotch-Irish farmers, would have let an empty picture frame sit around; it would have been sold for whatever it would fetch. And no one would ever have bothered putting any frame at all onto this ratty old painting once it had gotten so dirty in the attic.
Which meant that the painting must already have been in this beautiful frame when it went into the attic long ago. Which meant that long before that, before landscapes in ornate frames became unfashionable, somebody must have thought this one was valuable.
Behind the sofa, the curtains were partly drawn. I stood up and pulled them all the way open. A shaft of sunlight hit the painting and cut through the grime. It was as if I had set off a miniature nuclear explosion: Brilliant pink and orange clouds boiled above a line of trees and a waterfall. I walked around the sofa and over to the fireplace, then crouched in front of the canvas and stared at it from a few inches away. Under the accumulated dirt of five or six decades, water cascaded over rocks, wind whipped through a line of trees, and those clouds erupted into towers of fire.
I knew instantly that I was looking at a long-lost masterpiece of the Hudson River School of 19th-century American landscape painters. My thumb had an intuition of its own: I licked it and pulled it lightly across a rock in the bottom left corner. “F CHURCH 1848,” I read through the little window I had just opened in the dirt. My mind raced: Frederic Church, born in 1826, one of his earliest major paintings.
Here it is, after subsequently being cleaned and restored to its original glory. I can assure you it looked nothing like this on that day in 1975:
I shot up the stairs like a rocket. I found my parents, grabbed each of them by the arm and hissed, “There’s a Church downstairs.” My parents, understandably, hesitated – there could be no place of worship in this house of junk. Then they looked in my eyes, and they knew what I meant. I led them downstairs. We lugged the painting outside into the sunlight to look at it – then wordlessly, breathlessly carried it back into the living room.
The sale was the next day, held in the back yard, as so many auctions were in those days. We waited patiently for the painting to come up. The auctioneer, not knowing what it was, called it “an old landscape” and told the crowd that the frame might be worth salvaging if you could find someone to repair it. The audience was astonished when we paid about $2,000 for what one woman sitting in front of us called “a dirty old rag.” The underbidder was a dealer who often followed us around and bid on whatever we did, assuming that anything my parents wanted must be good; my dad called him “the pilotfish.” If not for him, we would have been the only bidder; there were no other takers at any price.
When we got the Church painting home, we worried about its condition. Working with cotton balls dabbed in art-restorers’ cleaning solution, we got most of the grime off it. But parts of the paint were loose and flaking away. It needed urgent care. Before we could even get it to a restorer, Donald Webster, an attorney and art dealer who ran the best auction house in Washington, D.C., C.G. Sloan & Co., visited. He bought the painting on the spot, for what I remember as about $16,000 (or a bit more than $70,000 in today’s money). We hated to part with such a tour de force, but Mr. Webster agreed that the first thing he would do was to take it to the same restorer we would have used.
As always, we didn’t think of what we had done as profiting from the ignorance of others; we thought of it as rescuing an artistically and historically important work of art from oblivion. What would have happened to these treasures if we hadn’t found them? In many cases we were all that stood between them and another century in somebody’s attic or pantry or toolshed – or, eventually, the town dump. I have no doubt, even today, that had we not identified the Church painting for what it was, it would have gone unsold that day and ended up in a landfill.
Shortly
