One lucky antiques enthusiast was in for the shock of a lifetime when they last went dumpster diving. Rifling through the trash in Hudson, New York last year, they chanced upon a discarded pen and ink sketch that turned out to be by the renowned English portrait painter George Romney. The unlikely discovery was a hit when it landed on the auction block early this week.

“When I first found it buried in the dumpster, it looked interesting but I had no idea it was nearly 300 years old,” the anonymous Hudson local said in a statement. “After taking it home and doing some research, I couldn’t believe it. How did this mid-18th century drawing from England end up in the trash in upstate New York?”

The drawing bears the label “G. Romney” on its mount and the artist’s studio stamp on the reverse. Specialists have confirmed the attribution. The rediscovery was included in the “Old Master, British, and European Pictures” sale at Rosebery’s in London on March 12, where it sold for £2,362 ($3,055) against an estimate of £600–£800 ($750–$1,000). According to the auction house, it was snapped up by a private collector in Malaysia.

“This sketch by George Romney has had such a remarkable journey, from being salvaged from a dustbin in upstate New York, to being offered at Rosebery’s in South London, before finding its way to a buyer in Malaysia,” Lara L’vov-Basirov, the house’s head of Old Master, British, and European Pictures, said in a statement. “Despite its modest size, this work on paper achieved a price well above estimate, reflecting both its art-historical importance and its extraordinary story.”

Romney was one of the leading society portrait painters of 18th-century Britain and his paintings are held in a great number of prestigious international collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Getty in the U.S.

As it happens, the sketch has been connected by auction specialists to a masterpiece at the Frick, less than 200 miles from the upstate location where it had become mere garbage.

Reverse of George Romney, Sketch of Henrietta, Countess of Warwick, seated with her arm oustretched, which was found in a dumpster in New York. Image courtesy Roseberys London.

The drawing is understood to be a study of Henrietta Greville, Countess of Warwick, according to a scrawled note on the reverse of the mount framing the image. According to Rosebery’s, it is a preparatory sketch for a 1787–89 oil portrait of the same countess with her two children that belongs to the Frick. In both cases, the countess is in a seated pose. The Grevilles were lifelong patrons and friends of Romney’s.

According to L’vov-Basirov, the work is typical of Romney’s mature style in the late 1780s for how it “is swiftly executed with simple, fluent, and seemingly spontaneous lines.” As a preparatory study, it “offers a tantalizing and intimate glimpse into the artist’s working method.”

Though Romney is best known for oil paintings that tend to sell in the tens of thousands, his pen and ink studies often surface at auction and reliably fetch sums of up to around $3,000. According to the Artnet Price Database, his Study of a seated lady and Study of a standing woman both sold for £1,664 ($2,105) and £896 ($1,133) respectively, including fees, at Bonhams London on February 18.

Alex Kidson, author of a 2015 catalogue raisonné for George Romney, confirmed the attribution to the 18th-century master. Rather than the Frick portrait, however, he believes the sketch may have been for another, lost portrait of the Countess of Warwick that is known to us only via an engraving. He noted also that “Romney made a number of other portraits of seated ladies around the same time which the drawing could equally be a study for.”

In any case, nothing is known about the work’s whereabouts before it turned up in a dumpster last year. The question of how this drawing journeyed, over several centuries, from the studio of a leading painter in England to upstate New York remains an intriguing mystery. Bizarrely, it is far from the first time that a valuable work of art has been rescued from the trash.

The “Old Master, British and European Pictures” sale included more than 470 lots and was led by the collection of the late Hugo Morley-Fletcher, a former Christie’s specialist who served as a ceramics expert on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow.

The article was originally published on February 21, 2025. It was updated on March 14, 2025, with the auction’s results.