You can stroll out of the Savers in Manchester, N.H., with a shirt for as little as $4.99. There are $2 rings for these fascinated with costume jewellery. Framed artworks too massive for cabinets lean invitingly towards one of many partitions.

The thrift retailer’s supervisor says that procuring there is sort of a private treasure hunt, which was actually the case for one lady who made the discover of a lifetime in 2017.

While pushing a steel cart via the Savers on a hunt for dwelling décor, she noticed a dusty portray with a considerable picket body amid a stack of posters and prints. Two ladies within the picture seemed to be in a standoff, the elder displaying stern disapproval.

The shopper was taken by the portray — Who had been the ladies? Why did they appear so tense? — and clunked it into her cart. Minutes later, she was wheeling out an genuine oil panel by N.C. Wyeth, one of many premier American illustrators of the twentieth century, recognized for bringing to life traditional tales like “Treasure Island,” “Robin Hood” and “Robinson Crusoe.”

Her invoice for the long-lost work, which is anticipated to promote at public sale on Tuesday for between $150,000 and $250,000? Four {dollars}.

“We look at all the donations we receive and we place a value on them as best we can,” mentioned the Savers supervisor, Shaun Edson. “We are not connoisseurs of paintings. We do our best to evaluate the pieces and value them appropriately.”

“I wasn’t with the company in 2017,” he added. “Obviously we missed the boat.”

The portray’s proprietor recalled the sequence of occasions in a phone interview with The New York Times and was granted anonymity as a result of she is about to turn into a lot richer from the sale of a portray that has drawn appreciable consideration.

After buying the piece, the client hung it in her bed room earlier than finally casting it apart right into a closet with college photos and different objects. When she rediscovered the work in May and observed a signed label on the again, she determined to put up some photos of it on Facebook.

Lauren Lewis, an artwork conservator, was amongst those that reached out after seeing the portray on social media. Eventually, the proprietor mentioned, she and her husband wrapped the portray in a blanket, loaded it into the again of their S.U.V. and drove about 90 minutes to satisfy Lewis within the parking zone of a bus terminal.

Wielding a magnifying glass, Lewis grew to become excited and spoke about facets of the work the proprietor had by no means thought of, reminiscent of its brushstrokes.

So the couple scrapped their plans to cease for lunch, as a substitute driving straight dwelling to rehang the portray. This time, the proprietor’s husband positioned pillows on the ground beneath it.

“How is this possible?” Lewis mentioned she had been asking herself since she first noticed the Wyeth on Facebook. “It’s all very fortuitous. This has all come together in a lovely way.”

The frontispiece illustration that’s now being auctioned was a part of a four-image set that Wyeth contributed for a 1939 version of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel “Ramona,” which revolves round an orphan residing in Southern California after the Mexican-American War. The illustration, additionally known as “Ramona,” portrays the stress between the younger lady and her foster mom, in response to catalog notes provided by the auction house Bonhams Skinner, which additionally say Wyeth was recognized for his “vivid colors and a skillful use of light and shadow.”

Wyeth’s work is featured at the Brandywine Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa., and he’s a part of one of the outstanding creative households within the United States. The Museum of Modern Art owns the portray “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth, certainly one of N.C. Wyeth’s 5 youngsters.

Experts say “Ramona” was most likely a present from ebook publishers to an editor or to the property of the writer. But precisely the way it wound up on the Savers in Manchester is unclear.

Good issues just like the thrift retailer discover, the portray’s proprietor mentioned, don’t usually occur to individuals like her and her husband. They have begun to permit themselves to consider the payments they’ll pay, and a trip to Germany to go to certainly one of their youngsters.

Aware that she’s going to quickly half methods with the portray, its proprietor purchased a replica of the 1939 model of “Ramona” on Amazon. Although she is a bibliophile, she plans to tear out Wyeth’s illustration of the 2 ladies and body it.

Alain Delaquérière contributed analysis.