If you’ve inherited some art from your grandparents, you might want to take a closer look at it before retiring it to storage.

An unsuspecting family decided to Google the signature on a painting that had been hanging in their home since it was painted back in 1971.

To their surprise, it turned out that it belonged to famous Nigerian painter and master of African modernism, Ben Enwonwu.

According to PUNCH, when the family was searching for information about the painting, they found themselves on Sotheby’s free Online Estimation Platform.

That’s when they realised they might be sitting on something rather valuable:

The painting fetched over seven times the pre-auction estimate, finally going under the hammer for £1.1m (1.3 million euros, $1.4m).

That’s roughly R21 million that was hanging on the wall in a house for a couple of decades and the family had no clue.

The work precedes the artist’s 1974 painting of Ife royal princess Adetutu ‘Tutu’ Ademiluyi, which recently turned up in a London flat after not being seen in decades.

The paintings of Ife royal princess Adetutu ‘Tutu’ Ademiluyi are national icons in Nigeria.

Enwonwu, who died in 1994, is considered the father of Nigerian modernism.

[source:punch]