By Intelligent Collector Staff | April 28, 2025
A painting purchased for $1,000 at a Florida estate sale emerged as an important work by Chinese Modernist Shiy De-jinn ahead of Heritage Auctions’ May 13 Modern & Contemporary Art sale.
The Portrait of Col. Charles W. Delanoy, dated 1960, depicts an American Air Force officer stationed in Taiwan. Identifying both the artist and sitter required research after the work surfaced without background information. A related portrait of Delanoy’s wife ultimately helped connect the painting to Shiy.
The rediscovery arrives in an auction that gives collectors several ways into postwar and contemporary art. Alexander Calder’s The Black Dress, from 1959, translates the artist’s economy of line and balance into painted sheet metal and wire.
Richard Diebenkorn’s Untitled from 1981 brings together gouache and crayon on paper, while Ai Weiwei’s Watermelon uses glazed porcelain to blur the line between traditional material and contemporary conceptual practice.
For buyers, the Shiy story is a reminder that scholarship can materially change how a work is understood. Attribution, provenance and relationships to an artist’s documented body of work can be just as important as immediate visual appeal.
By placing rediscoveries beside established modern and contemporary names, Heritage Auctions demonstrates why it can be the best place to buy fine art for collectors who value both connoisseurship and the possibility of encountering something newly understood.
Source: Heritage Auctions press release, “Painting Found at Estate Sale Revealed To Be Masterwork by Shiy De-jinn Joins Heritage’s May 13 Modern & Contemporary Art Auction” (April 28, 2025).