Russell Tandy Shadow Ranch Painting Sells for $9500.00

The video below, is the live online auction viewing of Swann Auction Gallery's sale of the Russell H. Tandy Nancy Drew painting, The Secret at Shadow Ranch. You can view the auction and see how it sold! I was excited to see the painting come back up for sale!

Several years ago, the painting was being sold in NYC and several of us got together planning to purchase the painting as a group since it was being sold for $15,000.00 and that was a bit spendy! However, we were uncertain at the time due to some differences in the painting and the book's dust jacket art. Plus, we were unable to get provenance provided nor a back story of how the consignor came to have the painting. So it all fell through and shortly thereafter the consignor took the painting back and we didn't hear anything further until a couple of months ago when I was contacted by the auction gallery selling it.

The back story was that the consignor purchased it over 10 years ago from a man in her building who worked for Simon & Schuster.

Turns out, thanks to David Farah, who purchased the Tandy Hidden Staircase painting, as profiled in the September/October 2007 issue of The Sleuth, he discovered that his painting was rather light on some details/shading especially--and further discoveries with other Tandy paintings led to the realization that the Tandy paintings were heavily added to in the printing process--especially with the purples/blacks in the shading process. So this explains why the Shadow Ranch painting is a bit different from the printed version on the dust jacket.

The minimum bid was at $3000.00 to start this afternoon, and while I really wanted to bid, I knew it would go for much higher than my budget. It sold for $9500.00. To whom? That's a mystery! Hopefully it was one of the Sleuths or a collector amongst us.

Jenn:)