Family nearly donated painting to Goodwill. It just sold for a small fortune in Texas
_fitted.png "A painting that was nearly donated to Goodwill recently sold at auction in Texas for more than $100,000, according to auction officials.")
A family nearly donated an heirloom painting to Goodwill, and it’s a mistake that would have cost them a small fortune, experts say.
“It was a family heirloom all these years,” the grandson of the original owner, his mother, told Dallas-based Heritage Auctions. “But it was decoration. We hadn’t considered researching it.”
It was gifted to her in 1922 by a relative in Texas, and it hung on the walls of every home she lived until the day she died, her family told the auction house. But the pretty landscape painting of bluebonnets seemed to be just that, pretty, and of little value beyond the sentimental.
“It’s too pretty to surrender,” their mother said, and the painting was rescued from the trailer bound for Goodwill, her family told the auction house.
“Whoever had packed the truck had either not noticed or not understood the signature ‘Julian Onderdonk’ on the lower front and back of the canvas,” the auction house said.
It went with her to the West Coast, where she spent her last years, after which it was passed along to her daughter.
It lived in the daughter’s dining room for a time until she decided to look up the artist, experts said. Onderdonk wasn’t just any Texas artist, she learned, he’s “the father of Texas painting.”
“If you’ve ever seen a painting of bluebonnets in Texas, it’s because of Onderdonk,” Atlee Phillips, director of Heritage Auctions, told Texas Monthly. “He made it a genre unto itself.”
This particular painting, “A Field of Bluebonnets, San Antonio,” was painted in 1921, experts said, adding it’s a “stellar example” of Onderdonk “in his absolute prime.”
It went up for auction June 29 and sold for $112,500, according to the Heritage Auctions website.
“That Onderdonk gem, replete with the artist’s hallmark extended vista, atmospheric haze, and densely packed fields of bluebonnets,” the auction house said.
While bluebonnet paintings became popular in part because of his work, nobody could match Onderdonk, according to the auction house.
“No one has topped his oeuvre when it comes to capturing the state flower’s presence on the Texas landscape,” the auction house said.
It’s hard to overstate the value of Onderdonk pieces. The bidding on “A Field of Bluebonnets, San Antonio” was planned to begin at $30,000, the auction house told Texas Monthly, but it closed at almost quadruple that number.
While most of his larger paintings have been snatched up by collectors over the years, many small pieces, the size of postcards, are still floating around and have been sold for $30,000 a piece, Phillips told the magazine.