A tiny painting purchased for $30 at an estate sale in Michigan last summer has sold for $1.3 million at Freeman's in New York, setting a new auction record for the mid-century American surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie. The 8-by-11-inch Alderman Merriam's Shells, dated 1951, was offered on October 1 and sailed past its $200,000 high estimate, with the final price including the buyer's premium. The result lifts the artist's auction benchmark by about a third from the previous record of $1 million, achieved at Sotheby's last November for Message for Mercy (1950), according to data website Arthur Analytics. Early last year, the record still stood below $1 million, at $864,000. The steep climb reflects a wave of institutional attention, including the touring retrospective Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery, which has helped revive the reputation of the strange, eccentric painter. The painting's journey reads like a fairy tale. Abercrombie had exchanged the canvas with a Kalamazoo physician, John Reynolds, for medical services; Reynolds remained its only owner from the early 1980s, as authenticated by expert Susan Weininger, occasionally lending it to museum exhibitions before it slipped from view into his estate. At the Michigan sale, a collector of records and vintage furniture recognised the signature in a hallway near the garage, later matching it to an archival photograph in the Milwaukee Art Museum exhibition catalogue. Even the $150,000 low estimate was 5,000 times the purchase price. Abercrombie spent her adult life in Chicago's Hyde Park, producing small, dreamlike canvases of lone figures and floating objects without ever securing conventional gallery representation, selling instead through department stores such as Marshall Field's. Freeman's head of post-war and contemporary art, Zack Wirsum, described the result as 'as happily ever after as it gets,' and said the team was delighted for the sharp-eyed consignor who rescued the work from obscurity.