In the lobby of the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago, a few blocks from Lake Michigan, is a little corner art gallery with some of the most amazing pieces of Salon and impressionist art I've seen publicly displayed.
A few years ago, my husband and I were invited over for dinner at the home of one of his former secretaries. As we were sitting in her livingroom having coffee, I happened to glance up to the wall at the top of her stairs and gasped.
"You have an Edouard Cortes!" I exclaimed.
"A what?" she asked.
"An Edouard Cortes. Do you have any idea how valuable those are?"
"No," she replied. I think I only paid a couple of dollars for it at a garage sale.
"Well, you could get a lot more than that for it now," I informed her, knowing that the Parisian street scene on her wall could well fetch $30,000-40,000 or more.
I had been an admirer of Cortes' work for some time. I'd seen it in little glass showcases in the Drake, and in the art gallery there. I'd lusted after it like a schoolgirl lusts after a dress she'll never have. "If I ever win the lottery," I thought.
So it caught my attention when one of the lead news stories yesterday featured an obscure painting that the owner had left at a Goodwill store in Maryland. It might have gotten a $2 tag placed out on it on the floor, were it not for the sharp eye of a Goodwill employee, who had it investigated.
The painting was an authentic Edouard Cortes, and was recently sold at action, with proceeds benefitting Goodwill, for $40,600.
This would be an interesting story in itself without the marvelous intrigue regarding the apparently unsuspecting donor, who is never named in the news articles.
A couple of years ago my husband's former secretary, who had long since moved up the corporate ladder, took a job with the U.S. State Department, and moved her household.
To Washington, D.C.
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