Surprise Surprise Curran – Daryle Lambert's Antique and Collectible Blog – Call from an old friend.

Charles Courtney Curran

Today, as I was planning my next strategy for winning the “Million Dollar Race” that members of our club are participating in, I received a call from an old friend of mine. The conversation started something like this "Daryle, I just found the greatest painting that I have seen in many years on the Internet." You know me, that is when I had to ask who it was by and what was it about.

Before I could even get the words out of my mouth about the artist, my friend said in an almost gushing manner, "The painting is by Charles Courtney Curran and it is a beautiful portrait of a lady". He also shared with me that it was being sold at Shannon's Auction, which is one that I often recommend to our members as an excellent place to sell their paintings.

Not wanting to stop him from this excitement that he was exhibiting, but wanting to know the pre-sale estimate for the painting, I asked and he quickly quoted $50,000 to $70,000. This proved very interesting to me because I have been trying to sell two of Curran's paintings on our site and eBay for quite some time. There is a lesson to be learned from this. The current offering of Curran's is possibly one of the best portraits that I have ever seen and this confirms William's judgment of the painting. Because this painting is so exquisite, the price of $70,000 may not even be the top bid when the hammer falls. Unlike the lady's portrait, my offerings are two fairly simple landscapes that have very little to distinguish them and so I have been unable to get $5000 for the pair, even though they are well worth that amount. So you ask me, what is the lesson? Just because you find a painting by an artist that has very high posted auction results, it doesn't mean that there is an active market for every piece they did. Here is an example where you need to be comparing apples to apples.

I would highly recommend that you visit Shannon's home page and view the wonderful selection of paintings that are being offered on October the 29^th. Here is the site Shannon's Auction.

I have to congratulate William for his excellent eye for fine paintings. He also shared with me that the last several months have been rather slow for him in this business but he has taken this period and religiously spent several hours each day in accumulating knowledge of the rare and unusual pieces of pottery, fine art, art glass and other antiques that have been mentioned in previous blogs. You can bet somewhere in the future you will be seeing blogs about the success of William in Houston.

I hope that in the future we will be able to receive comments on the blog but that doesn't seem to be happening at the present time. I would appreciate if you would send all comment to www.31corp.com until I can solve this problem.

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