This Antiques Roadshow guest’s forgotten family painting collected dust for years before it became one of the most expensive paintings ever appraised on the show

• A Texas man was shocked to find that his family heirloom was worth millions
• The piece was identified as an early work of Mexican painter Diego Rivera
• The artwork, titled ‘El Albañil,’ was valued at between $1.2 and $2.2m in 2018

A Texas man was shocked when a portrait that had been left behind a door to collect dust was deemed the most expensive painting ever to appear on Antiques Roadshow.

The popular television program, which has been running since 1997, follows auction house specialists as they travel around the country, offering free appraisals of antiques and collectibles.

Clips from the show have resurfaced on TikTok, delighting a brand new generation of viewers.  

When the show travelled to Corpus Christi in 2012, one guest brought an oil painting that had been in his family for more than eight decades.

His great-grandparents had purchased the painting in 1930, which depicted a serious-looking man standing alongside a pail. It had been hanging behind a door in his house and was obscured every time the door was opened.

‘Oh dear,’ appraiser Colleene Fesko said upon hearing the news.

The artwork was identified as ‘El Albañil,’ an early work of prominent Mexican painter Diego Rivera, who was born in December 1886.

The painting was completed in 1904, when Rivera was just 18 years old, and featured a bricklayer, foreshadowing a theme that would crop up in Rivera’s later pieces: workers of Mexico.

‘El Albañil’ was listed in the Mexican City records as ‘missing’ after 1930, likely after the man’s great-grandparents purchased it, Fesko explained.

In 1996, 39 years after Rivera’s death, the painting resurfaced when a Houston rancher brought it to Marion Oettinger, at the time the curator of the San Antonio Museum of Art.

Rugeley Ferguson, Sr., told Oettinger that his family acquired the painting in the 1940s and were informed that the painting was fake, due to inconsistencies in Rivera’s handwriting.

However, it turned out that this was due to Rivera’s age – he had yet to formalize his signature.

According to an obituary for Ferguson, who died in 2017, his personal collection of Wedgwood fine china was also loaned to the San Antonio Museum of Art. 

By coincidence, Oettinger had received a book about Rivera’s early works around that time. She immediately recognized the unusual signature on another painting in the book.

One year later, an expert on Rivera’s paintings, Ramon Favela, authenticated ‘El Albañil.’

The painting underwent a restoration before it was displayed at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Latin American Art in 1998.

The artwork reappeared once again in 2012, when it wound up on Antiques Roadshow and became the most expensive painting ever appraised on the show.

‘The painting itself is by a very important artist, it has a terrific history of being purchased in Mexico in 1930, and it’s a very beautiful and important painting,’ Fesko explained.

‘So, trifectas usually pay pretty well. I would be putting a retail estimate on the piece of between $800,000 and $1 million.’

The Texas man gaped upon hearing the appraisal. And that wasn’t all – six years later, an updated appraisal set the retail value even higher, at between $1.2 and $2.2 million.

In a subsequent interview on Twin Cities PBS, the owner was asked what he planned to do with the painting.

‘Now I’m really scared to carry it around,’ he said, adding that he thought that it should be passed off a museum ‘where everybody can look at it’.

The painting went on permanent loan to the San Antonio Museum of Art, where it has remained ever since.