Renoir painting reportedly bought at US flea market

A woman who allegedly paid less than $60 for a box of assorted art items at a flea market including a canvas by famous French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, American channel ABC reported.

“Paysage Bords de Seine ” is now scheduled to be auctioned at 10 a.m. on Sept. 29 by the Potomack Company, a fine arts and antiques auction gallery in Alexandria, Va. The painting is expected to sell for between $75,000 and $100,000, the American press informed.

According to the Potomack Company fine arts Anne Norton Craner specialist what had actually caught the buyers’ eye in the box wasn’t the valuable Renoir but a plastic cow and a Paul Bunyan doll.

“She stored the rest of the box’s contents first in a white plastic bag in a shed, later in her car’s trunk and eventually in her kitchen,” Norton said in a news release.

The unnamed woman told the auction house that she was “more interested in the frame than the landscape, and started taking it apart.” The owner wants to remain anonymous and reportedly bought the lot of items at a flea market in the Shenandoah Valley.

Records show the painting was last purchased by an international lawyer in Paris in 1926. ABC reported tt’s not known how it made its way to the Virginia flea market.