Sketch Bought at Thrift Shop Is Worth 6 Figures

A sharp-eyed customer who picked up an unusual sketch at a Habitat for Humanity thrift shop in New York City is going to make a handsome profit. Turns out, the sketch (see it here) is by a renowned Austrian expressionist named Egon Schiele, and it could fetch up to $200,000 when it's eventually sold, reports the Art Newspaper. It's not clear how much the unidentified thrift shop customer paid, but the lucky person promises to give a portion of the proceeds back to Habitat for Humanity. The image is of a nude female in Schiele's distinctive style, which the Smithsonian describes as "at once erotic and hideous."

The artist, who died at 28 in 1918 in the Spanish flu epidemic, used "tortured expressions, twisted limbs and voyeuristic angles" regularly, explains the magazine. “If you look at the way this girl is lying on her back, and you look at the foreshortening both on the rib cage and on her face, and the way you see that little nose pointing up—think about how difficult that is to do,” Schiele expert Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City tells Art. “There are very few people in the history of art who can draw like that.” (Read about a much greater profit for a work of art.)