Room by room, the art historian Malo de Lussac went through the home of a family near the French city of Tours to make an inventory of their belongings. He was doing here what he had done before; that’s his job. But when he saw this picture hidden behind the door of the TV room, he could hardly believe his eyes: a real Brueghel! Unlike him, the residents of the house tend not to be art connoisseurs, like the newspaper The Connection wrote: That’s why you gave the picture the name “the crust”, and accordingly it yellowed away from a larger audience behind the door. How often have you thought: “Next week the old ham will end up in the bulky waste”? Thanks to Malo de Lussac, that won’t happen again.
This work was anything but trash. It was probably painted by the Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Younger around 1615 or 1617. Brueghel’s father, the elder, who was also a painter, died when the son was only five years old. Many of the younger’s works were copies of his father’s paintings. He clearly created the picture that has now been discovered himself, even if it does not bear his signature. At some point it must have been acquired, but over the decades the name of the creator has been forgotten.
This find is good news for art lovers. He shows everyone else that it can definitely be worth looking twice before dismissing something prematurely as useless. Would the conclusions have been different if Oliver Kahn and Hasan Salihamidžić had taken Malo de Lussac’s advice before dismissing Julian Nagelsmann? If Christine Lambrecht were still Minister of Defense, would the public have taken a closer look at her – and even discovered hidden qualities in her?
In any case, after the expert’s inspection, the picture that hung behind the TV room door gained a very concrete increase in value. On Tuesday, a Swiss bidder acquired it at an auction in Paris for 600,000 euros.
Read previous episodes of the column here. You can find more good news here.