9. The $7 Renoir That Wasn’t Hers
Here is the page where the dream goes sideways. In 2012, a woman named Marcia Fuqua was about to sell a small landscape through the Potomack Company, an auction house near Washington, D.C. She said she bought it for $7 in a box of trinkets at a flea market.
The painting was a genuine Renoir. It was also stolen. A reporter for the Washington Post discovered it had vanished from the Baltimore Museum of Art on November 17, 1951, while on loan to the museum.
The sale was halted, and a federal judge awarded the painting to the museum in January 2014, citing overwhelming evidence that it was stolen. The judge did not decide whether Fuqua’s flea-market story was true. Stolen art cannot be legally kept, even by a buyer acting in good faith.
The painting went home to Baltimore. A real Renoir for $7, and the buyer got nothing. Sometimes the most valuable lesson about a find is who it belongs to.