Warhol drawing bought for £3 at jumble sale valued at £1.3 mln

PanARMENIAN.Net - A businessman has told how he bought an original Andy Warhol drawing from a jumble sale for £3, before having it valued at more than £1.3 million, The Telegraph reported.

Andy Fields, from Tiverton, a town in the English County of Devon, claims to have snapped up the 1930s sketch in Las Vegas, where it was hidden among a pile of artwork.

The vendor, alleged to be a drug user, told him his aunt used to care for Warhol when he was a child. The picture, which is signed, is thought to have been created when the artist was just ten or eleven years old.

The claim would make the drawing the earliest known example of his famous pop art style. A formal valuation of the work has estimated its worth at a £1.3m, but Mr Fields has claimed he has been told it could be worth ten times that.

The father-of-one said he had no immediate plans to sell it and was not interested in financial gain, but now hopes to put the picture on display for others to enjoy.

The pictures, on discoloured, tattered paper, shows a man’s face, believed to be 1930s singer and actor Rudy Vallee, sketched on a background of yellow, orange and green squares.

Mr Fields told the Sun it is an “incredibly important work” and proved Andy Warhol had begun his Pop Art work earlier than previously thought.

He said: “It moves the birth of Pop Art back two decades, showing Warhol was already doing that sort of stuff at a far younger age.”

He added he had spent weeks trying to find the man who sold it to him to find out more about the background, but he had “vanished”.

One Warhol piece, “Eight Elvises” sold for £62.5m in 1963, while his Elizabeth Taylor portrait has fetched £14.8m.