$5 painting sells for $1m in US

A man who paid $5 (€4.09) for a painting by still-life artist Joseph Decker that had been sitting in a garage for more than 60 years has sold it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington for $1m (€819,000).

The unidentified 29-year-old actor found the painting of Decker’s Ripening Pears (circa 1884-85) wrapped in a blanket while rummaging through a garage sale in Los Angeles three years ago, according to the report in ARTnewsletter.

The woman who sold the man the painting said it had been sitting in her garage for more than 60 years, ARTnews said.

The painting hung on the man’s kitchen wall for two years before he decided to get it framed last October, the magazine said.

Once he realised Decker’s fame, the man e-mailed a digital photo of the picture to the Manhattan-based Richard York Gallery, which specialises in 19th- and 20th-century American art.

“I looked at the e-mail, and I said, ‘It’s too good to be true,”’ said Meredith Ward, executive vice president of the Richard York Gallery, which served as the man’s broker.

Ward said the gallery offered the painting to two museums before the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, came into the picture. “They own two Deckers,” Ward said.

Decker was born in 1853 in Germany. He moved with his family to Brooklyn in 1867 and studied at the National Academy of Design in New York.

Decker is known for his harsh and vibrant still-lifes, mostly of fruit in vivid colours. He died in 1924.