Well, It Might Be

A Swedish auction house has sold a painting that was billed as being the work of a student of Peter Paul Rubens. Now, that is what the owners were selling it as. However, word leaked out that at least one art authority thought maybe, possibly, kinda-sorta could be, the painting might actually be by Rubens himself. Whereupon, the bidding went up just a wee, tiny bit.

To 1,000 times the asking price.

Bids for the painting at an auction on Tuesday started at 15,000 Swedish crowns (1,100 pounds), but a buzz that this was a real Rubens set the price soaring to 16.6 million (1.2 million pounds), the second-most ever paid for a painting in Sweden.

The sellers, a couple in their 70s from Sweden's west, put the painting up for auction in Uppsala because they no longer had room for it, according to Sweden's Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

Gorel Cavalli-Bjorkman, professor and head of research at Sweden's Nationalmuseum, told Reuters she had found evidence the painting could well be the real thing.

"This is very exciting, it is looking pretty good. I have found the painting published (as a Rubens) in a book from 1980 but the auction firm didn't know, because it was sold under a different name," she said.

If the picture is a Rubens, then it was a study for a work called Dido and Aeneas, she said, adding that according to the book, the study had been unaccounted for since 1949.

Now we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are not art experts, we rely instead on our expert sources. They tell us that Blue Crab Boulevard may well be actually an original Picasso. No, honest, they do. Ok, we made that up entirely. But we do have genuine experts on call all over the place. For example, here's a brief history of art.