Sometimes a painting hangs on a wall for decades before anyone asks the right question.
That was the case for a portrait by Scottish Colorist F.C.B. Cadell, which sold at Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull for £189,200, or $254,000, after Helene Plotkin bought it in a White Plains, New York, thrift store in the 1960s for less than $100.
The painting, a portrait of a pale-faced woman reclining on a bright red chair, caught Plotkin’s eye because its brushwork and bold colour reminded her of French Fauvist art. Plotkin had majored in art history, and her instinct was close. Cadell, who was born in Edinburgh, studied in Paris in the early 1900s, where he admired Henri Matisse and mixed with the French avant-garde.
But the work stayed on her wall for more than 60 years until her son, Barry Plotkin, decided to investigate in late 2025. He uploaded a photograph to Gemini, Google’s A.I. assistant.
Gemini identified Cadell’s signature in the upper right corner. It also told Barry Plotkin to check a label on the back of the canvas, which led to records showing the work had been sold at Christie’s London in 1966 for £21, about $680 in today’s money. It is not clear how or when the painting ended up in the thrift store months later.
The Plotkins then contacted Lyon & Turnbull, which specialises in the Scottish Colorists, the group of Post-Impressionists that also included Samuel Peploe, John Fergusson and Leslie Hunter.
The auction house titled the work Interior: The Lady in Black and included it in a June 4 sale of Cadell’s peers that made £1.8 million, or $2.4 million. The painting sold within its estimate of £150,000 to £200,000, or $208,000 to $267,700.
According to Artnet’s Price Database, Cadell’s auction record is £874,000, or $1.2 million, paid for Reflection at Sotheby’s London in 2018.
Lyon & Turnbull said the work dates to the mid-1920s, after Cadell’s demobilisation from the army, when he bought a six-floor Georgian townhouse across from his childhood home. The auction house said the painting shows the artist at his peak, working in a first-floor studio with a marble mantelpiece and a gilded mirror.
“This is the peak of his career, he’s painting in this extraordinarily modern manner with aspects of art deco style, before that term has even been coined,” Alice Strang, a specialist at Lyon & Turnbull who is working on a book about the Scottish Colorists, said over the phone. “He’s having fun and showing off because he’s brought together so many of his most famous visual motifs.”
Those motifs include the red chair, a bright embroidered cloak, and a table with a blue and white coffee set and a black fan with a ribbon for dancing.
Gemini got one detail wrong. It identified the sitter as Miss Don Wauchope, but auction specialists said the woman was May Easter, one of Cadell’s favourite models, based on her red hair.
Strang said that shows where A.I. falls short. ”The story illustrates how A.I. can get you started, but there’s no comparison for real expertise,” Strang said. “The painting could have been a copy, it could have been by his cousin, Florence St John Cadell, and you can only tell so much through photographs.”
Carina Popovici, founder of A.I. Art Recognition, also urged caution. “I would be cautious about drawing broader conclusions about the suitability of publicly available A.I. tools for art authentication,” she said in an email. “The quality of the training data is at least as important as the sophistication of the A.I. model itself and specialized scholarship often sits with individual experts, catalogues raisonne, and archival material not accessible online.”
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