LOST DALí WORK BOUGHT AT HOME SALE FOR $200 SELLS FOR OVER $60,000 AT AUCTION
A watercolour and felt-tip artwork was bought for £150 (about $200) by a local antiques and art dealer two years ago at a house clearance sale in Cambridge. Since then, it has been conclusively determined that the piece is Salvador Dalí's long-lost Vecchio Sultano. The Surrealist piece then went up for auction in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2025, and it brought in an incredible £45,700 (almost $61,000).
Vecchio Sultano, a 1966 Dalí creation, shows a sultan wearing a huge turban lavishly embellished with jewels. Interestingly, the picture doesn't look much like Dalí's previous pieces; instead, it leans more toward figuration, narrative context, and Middle Eastern folklore than the surrealist symbols and concepts that the artist was famous for. Perhaps the reason for this stylistic mismatch is that Vecchio Sultano was first commissioned in 1963 by a rich Italian couple named Giuseppe and Mara Albaretto as part of a bigger series that was influenced by The Arabian Nights.
"People anticipate seeing highly weird pieces by Dalí," Dalí scholar Nicolas Descharnes told The Guardian. "This is a Dalí, but it's not surrealism."
Nevertheless, Dalí gave up on the Arabian Nights project after producing 100 of the 500 planned pieces, of which the Albaretto family still owned half. These pieces have subsequently been lost or damaged, but the other half ended up in Rizzoli's collection, where they were awaiting publication.
The BBC was informed by Gabrielle Downie of Cheffin Auctioneers, the company that sold the piece, that "[Vecchio Sultano] most certainly originated from the batch of 50 which were retained and eventually lost by the publishers."
Vecchio Sultano was offered in a Sotheby's London sale on October 25, 1995, and was correctly marketed as a Dalí, according to Artnet's auction and price records. The unidentified buyer of the piece discovered Dalí's signature in the canvas's lower-right corner and Sotheby's tags on the reverse during the 2023 clearance sale, decades later. Before putting the painting up for sale at Cheffin Auctioneers, he spent £4,000 (just over $5,200) to have it verified and to find out where it came from.
For Dalí historians, this is a major rediscovery since "the loss of an attribution is fairly unique in the modern art world," Downie continued. “To handle a genuine rediscovery of a work by someone who is easily one of the most famous artists in the world and the godfather of surrealism is a real honour."