A lost Salvador Dalí painting, called Vecchio Sultano, that was initially purchased for £150 (about $200) has sold at auction for £45,700 (nearly $60,800). A local art dealer and collector, whose name has not been revealed to protect his identity, found the watercolor and felt-tip painting two years ago at a house clearance sale in Cambridge, U.K. He noticed Dalí‘s signature on the bottom and Sotheby’s stickers on the back, but initially thought it may have been a fake. Still, he bid for it “on the spur of the moment,” and won it after offering £150. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime feeling,” he told The Guardian. On October 24, the painting sold at auction for £45,700 to an overseas buyer after Cheffins, an auctioneering company, authenticated the painting as a piece of Dalí‘s 1966 planned 500 painting series of The Arabian Nights. “I was very pleased after all the uncertainty and doubt right at the beginning about whether it was real or not, and the whole journey for the last two years… it was just extraordinary," the original buyer, who spent £4,000 (about $5,320) authenticating the painting, told The Guardian.
