How A.I. Helped Identify A Lost Scottish Masterpiece

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Thrift-Store Find by F.C.B. Cadell Sells for £189,200 After AI-Assisted Identification

A painting bought for less than $100 in a White Plains, New York, thrift store in the 1960s has been identified as a work by Scottish artist Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883–1937) and sold for £189,200 ($254,000) at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh. The rediscovery began with a family hunch, a smartphone photo, and Google's Gemini assistant - but it ended with archival records, specialist knowledge, and a corrected attribution that only human expertise could supply.

Helene Plotkin purchased the portrait decades ago after noticing its pale-faced sitter, bright red chair, and brisk, color-saturated handling. Her son Barry revisited the work in late 2025, uploading an image to Gemini. The tool identified Cadell's signature in the upper right corner and suggested checking a label on the back of the canvas. That led the family to records showing the painting had been sold at Christie's London in 1966 for £21, a sum that would be roughly $680 today.

Lyon & Turnbull later named the work Interior: The Lady in Black. The auction house, which has long cultivated expertise in the Scottish Colorists - the Post-Impressionist circle that included Samuel Peploe, John Fergusson, and Leslie Hunter - offered the painting in a June 4 sale devoted to Cadell's peers. The lot sold within its presale estimate of £150,000 to £200,000, helping push the sale total to £1.8 million ($2.4 million).

The painting dates to the mid-1920s, when Cadell had returned from military service and was living in a six-floor Georgian townhouse near his childhood home. By then, he was working in a first-floor studio filled with northern light and furnished with the kind of polished interiors that recur throughout his best-known pictures. A marble mantel, a gilded mirror, a red chair, an embroidered cloak, and a black fan all appear here, arranged with a compositional confidence that Alice Strang, a Lyon & Turnbull specialist, described as the peak of his career.

Strang also noted the limits of machine identification. Gemini incorrectly named the sitter as Miss Don Wauchope; specialists said she was May Easter, one of Cadell's favored models.“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.”

Cadell's auction record remains £874,000 ($1.2 million) for Reflection, sold at Sotheby's London in 2018. This latest result suggests that provenance research, connoisseurship, and digital tools may increasingly work in tandem - but not as equals.

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