She Paid $7 For The Box. The Painting Inside Was A Renoir

Marcia "Martha" Fuqua walked into a flea market in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in late 2009 with a handful of dollar bills and no plan. She came out with a box that contained a plastic cow, a Paul Bunyan doll, and a small landscape painting in a rough frame. The whole lot cost her $7. She thought the frame might be worth something.

The Napkin-Sized Renoir

The painting sat in a garbage bag at her mother's house for about two years. When Fuqua finally took it to a local auction house, the Potomack Company in Alexandria, Virginia, the experts recognized the signature immediately. It was Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Paysage Bords de Seine, painted in 1879 on a linen napkin at a riverside restaurant, reportedly a gift for the artist's mistress. The painting measured just five and a half by nine inches. The auction house estimated it would fetch between $75,000 and $100,000.

A 1951 Police Report

Two days before the 2012 auction, a Washington Post reporter called the Baltimore Museum of Art to ask whether they had any record of the piece. They did. Saidie Adler May, a Baltimore collector, had loaned the Renoir to the museum in 1937. It was reported missing from the galleries on November 17, 1951. The paperwork was still in the files. The auction was halted within hours.

A 63-Year Gap Nobody Could Explain

The FBI took custody of the painting and spent two years tracing its journey from a Baltimore museum wall to a box of bric-a-brac in West Virginia. They never figured it out. Fuqua's own mother, an artist, had been questioned. Reporters noted the family had connections to the Baltimore art world decades earlier. Fuqua insisted she had simply picked up the box at random. No criminal charges were filed against anyone.

She Fought For It And Lost

Fuqua sued to keep the painting. In January 2014, federal judge Leonie Brinkema ruled against her, citing the museum's original donor will, the 1951 police report, and insurance records as "overwhelming" evidence of ownership. The Renoir went back to the Baltimore Museum of Art and was displayed in their centennial exhibition later that year. Fuqua kept the $7 receipt. She did not get the painting, the plastic cow, or the doll on record.