How A.I. Helped Identify a Lost Scottish Masterpiece
A painting later identified as a work by Scottish Colorist F.C.B. Cadell sold for £189,200 ($254,000) at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh after being bought for less than $100 at a White Plains, New York, thrift store in the 1960s by Helene Plotkin. Plotkin’s son Barry investigated the work in late 2025 by uploading a photo to Google’s A.I. assistant Gemini, which helped identify Cadell’s signature and prompted him to check a label on the back that led to provenance records. Those records indicated the painting had been sold at Christie’s London in 1966 for £21 (about $680 today), though it is unclear how it ended up in a thrift store soon afterward. Lyon & Turnbull sold the work, titled “Interior: The Lady in Black” and dated to the mid-1920s, on June 4 within its presale estimate of £150,000–£200,000, in a sale totaling £1.8 million ($2.4 million).
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This story was covered in Repatriation Reckonings and Museums Under Siege