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Two years ago, a local antiques and art dealer purchased a watercolor and felt-tip painting at a house clearance sale in Cambridge for £150 (about $200). Since then, the artwork has been positively identified as Salvador Dalí’s long-lost Vecchio Sultano. Then, on October 23, 2025, the Surrealist composition went to auction in the U.K., where it snagged a whopping £45,700 (nearly $61,000).
Created by Dalí in 1966, Vecchio Sultano depicts a sultan donning a massive turban, adorned with decadent jewels. Notably, the painting bears little resemblance to Dalí’s other works, leaning more into figuration, narrative context, and Middle Eastern folklore rather than the surrealist symbols and ideas for which the artist was known. That stylistic contrast can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Vecchio Sultano was originally part of a larger series inspired by The Arabian Nights and commissioned by Giuseppe and Mara Albaretto, a wealthy Italian couple, in 1963.
“People expect to see very surrealist pieces by Dalí,” Nicolas Descharnes, a Dalí expert, told The Guardian. “This one is not surrealist, but it’s a Dalí.”
Still, Dalí abandoned the Arabian Nights project after creating 100 of the intended 500 artworks, half of which remained with the Albaretto family. The other half landed in Rizzoli’s collection, awaiting publication, but these works have since been either lost or damaged.
“It is most likely that [Vecchio Sultano] came from the batch of 50 which were retained and later lost by the publishers,” Gabrielle Downie of Cheffin Auctioneers, which sold the work, told the BBC.
Per Artnet’s auction and price databases, Vecchio Sultano was offered at a Sotheby’s London sale on October 25, 1995, where it was accurately advertised as a Dalí. Decades later, during the clearance sale in 2023, the work’s unnamed buyer noticed Dalí’s signature in the bottom-right corner of the canvas and Sotheby’s stickers on the back. He then spent £4,000 (a little over $5,200) to get the painting authenticated and research its provenance before offering it to Cheffin Auctioneers.
“The loss of an attribution is quite rare in the modern art world, making this a significant rediscovery for Dalí scholars,” Downie added. “To handle a genuine rediscovery of a work by someone who is easily one of the most famous artists in the world and the godfather of surrealism is a real honor.”
A multimedia painting by Salvador Dalí recently resurfaced at a house clearance sale in Cambridge, where it was sold for about $200.
Portrait of Salvador Dalí in 1939, from the Carl Van Vechten Photographs collection at the Library of Congress. (Photo: Carl Van Vechten via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
It has since been sold for over $60,000 at auction—300 times more than the price at which it was originally bought.
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Sources: Forgotten Dalí Painting, Bought for $200, Just Sold for 300 Times More; Lost Dali artwork found in house clearance is sold; Lost Salvador Dalí painting bought for £150 sold at auction for £45,700; Salvador Dalí painting bought for £150 at house clearance sale valued at £20-30,000
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