When Helene Plotkin purchased a painting of a seated woman at a White Plains thrift store sixty years ago, she bought it because she liked it. A former art student, she admired its colors and brushwork, and the price was right: she remembers it costing under $100. Now, thanks to Ms. Plotkin’s eye, her son’s curiosity, and a little help from the Google chatbot Gemini, her family is more than $250,000 richer.
Verified by specialists as an original canvas by noted Scottish artist F.C.B. Cadell (1883–1937), the work sold to a private buyer at auction June 4 for $189,200 pounds with fees. Though Plotkin, now 88, always treasured the painting—which depicts a chic woman in a dark dress and 1920s-style turban in a modernist interior—she never had it appraised. “I never, never thought about it at all,” Plotkin said in a recent telephone interview with the New York Times, “other than I loved the painting.”
The story of how the work came to be identified began last December, when Plotkin’s son Barry, 60, thought he would research its origins. The title on the back of the work was clear enough, reading, “Portrait of Miss Don Wauchope.” But the signature was illegible. It occurred to Barry that Gemini, Google’s A.I. assistant might be able to help.
He took a photo of the painting, uploaded it to Gemini, and asked the chatbot what it could tell him about it. “It was amazing how much information came out of that,” he told the Times. Noting the work’s orange accents and Art Deco aesthetics, Gemini suggested it might be one of Cadell’s. It added that the painter was affiliated with a group called the Scottish Colorists, which also included John Duncan Fergusson, George Leslie Hunter and Samuel John Peploe.
And it suggested that the Plotkins contact Nick Curnow and Alice Strang at the auction house Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh, where the painting was eventually sold.
While Strang and Curnow confirmed the A.I.’s identification, they noted that subject of the work is not Bethia Hamilton Don Wauchope, but another of the painter’s models, May Easter. (It has since been retitled.) They did, however, pronounce the piece one of Cadell’s masterworks. “Cadell’s stylishly decorated home became the subject matter of a remarkable series of works created in the 1920s,” Ms. Strang told the Independent. “This painting is a magnificent bringing together of many of his most celebrated motifs.”
