A drawing valued at $200,000 that was found at a Queens thrift store is now on display at a Manhattan gallery.
The sketch of a young girl, by Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele, was found at the Habitat for Humanity New York City ReStore in Woodside sometime in June 2018 by a customer who recognized its similarity to Schiele’s other works.
The customer purchased the drawing and nearly a year later asked Jane Kallir, the leading expert on Schiele and director of the Galerie St. Etienne, to analyze it, a representative for the gallery said.
“Based on the fluidity and spontaneity of the line, this drawing is, in my opinion, clearly by the hand of Egon Schiele,” Kallir said in a statement. “The subject, too, is unmistakably his: a little girl who regularly posed for the artist, alone and with her mother, in 1918.”
The drawing was likely done during the same modeling session as two of Schiele’s other works, Kallir said.
It is now on display at the midtown gallery as part of the exhibit “The Art Dealer as Scholar.” Another work featuring the girl and a drawing of the girl’s mother also are on display, the gallery said.
“In over 30 years of authenticating Schiele’s work, I have only once before encountered a drawing with such an unlikely provenance,” Kallir said.
If the sketch is sold, a portion of the proceeds will go to Habitat for Humanity New York City.
“I can’t help but think that were it not for the Habitat NYC ReStore, this piece of art history might have ended up in a landfill, lost forever,” said Karen Haycox, CEO of Habitat for Humanity New York City. “It has been given new life.”
Schiele died in 1918 from the Spanish flu pandemic at the age of 28.
