Cabbie's car boot painting sells for £90,000

Updated
The miniature painting.
The miniature painting.



An Indian painting bought by a taxi driver for £40 has sold at auction for £92,250 - to everybody's surprise.

The unnamed cabbie had found the 59 by 85cm miniature at a car boot sale and haggled the price down from £60 to £40.

But thirty years on, after deciding that it was taking up too much room and that he fancied a change of decor, he decided to sell.

Auction house Rosebery's estimated the value at between £500 and £1,000 and accepted it for a specialist sale of Indian and Islamic art last week.

But after furious bidding, both within the room and via seven phone lines, the price rocketed up to £75,000 plus a 23% buyer's premium.

The painting eventually went to an anonymous buyer on the phone.

"It was great to tell the vendor how well his picture had done. It is the moment we all strive for as auctioneers to be able to deliver a positive result," says Rosebery's director and specialist Peter Greenway.

"What made it even better was the vendor told me what a bad day he was having as his taxi had a flat tyre and he wasn't able to go to work. Having heard the news he decided to give himself the weekend off!"

It's not known what triggered the frantic bidding, although the painting is particularly attractive and has religious connotations.

It depicts a scene in the walled old town of Amritsar in the Punjab, with the Golden Temple in the background - the holiest gurdwara, or religious complex, of the Sikh religion.

Another reason for the appeal of the painting is that the artist is thought to be Baba Bishan Singh, who was one of a family of artists responsible for maintaining the murals on the walls of the Golden Temple in the late nineteenth century.

He's a highly-regarded artist - one of his paintings once sold for over $230,000 - and he even appears in the painting himself, in an alcove of a building towards the top left.

Car boot sales can be great hunting-grounds for overlooked treasures. We recently reported, for example, on the Rolex picked up for a tenner that later sold for £46,000.

Be prepared to haggle, as most sellers will expect it. And leave your designer bag at home: you don't want to look too well-off. Your best bet is to get there early - and stay late, as many sellers will cut prices at the end of the day to avoid having to take things home.

A Former Cab Driver Bought This $170M Painting
A Former Cab Driver Bought This $170M Painting






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