A hunch and an AI chatbot just turned a thrift-store score into a quarter-million-dollar windfall. In 1966, art lover Helene Plotkin, who the Edinburgh Reporter notes was pregnant at the time with her first child and looking to decorate her apartment, paid less than $100 for a colorful portrait she found in a shop in White Plains, New York. "My background in art history and studio practice drew me to this piece instantly," she now tells the BBC. Plotkin hung the piece on her wall for decades, never suspecting it was anything more than a piece she liked, per the New York Times. That changed when her son Barry recently snapped a photo, uploaded it to Google's Gemini, and asked what it was looking at.
The chatbot flagged the work as a 1920s studio portrait by Scottish Colorist FCB Cadell, even identifying the style, studio, and model, then urged the family to seek out experts and provided names. Auction house Lyon & Turnbull confirmed the painting's origins—though it corrected the model's identity—and sold "Interior: The Lady in Black" this month for about $254,000 to a private buyer. Plotkin, now 88 and living in Florida, says the proceeds will go to her sons; her main wish is that the painting occasionally be shown in public so her grandchildren might one day spot "Nana's painting" on a museum wall. The development underscores how AI image tools could expand access to the kind of object identification typically reserved for specialists.
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