After Amesbury, Massachusetts, auctioneer John McInnis found the painting leaning against an attic rafter, he tipped us off. The house was filled with treasures, but nothing came close to the painting, a landscape scene depicting a yet-to-be-identified river or marsh at sunset and a small sailing vessel, in its original gilded frame, and in untouched condition.

"It's a major work by Heade, unlike any other composition I've seen," says Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., curator of American art at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum and author of two landmark books about Heade. Stebbins believes the painting found in the attic dates from the 1870s.

HEADE WHO?
Today considered a leading American painter of the 19th century, Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) was not particularly famous during his lifetime, preferring to make a quiet living as a painter. Over the course of 60 years, Heade painted some 625 known works. His favorite landscape subject was the salt marsh, rendered in at least 120 paintings completed between 1859 and 1904.

"Heade turns up more than most of the good American artists because he wasn't well known," says Stebbins. "People bought his paintings and then put them away at some point."

In recent years, more than a dozen Heades have appeared, says Stebbins. "But only two have been significant: One, of magnolias, was found at a yard sale in California. The other is this one, which turned up in an attic in Boston."

With Heade works topping the million-dollar mark in the past, estimates for how much the newly discovered landscape scene would bring varied from $200,000 to seven figures. Leslie and I knew that our original estimate was conservative, but we didn't want to get the homeowner's hopes up. Stebbins guesses Heade would have received $150 for the painting originally (about $2,000 in today's dollars).

ART PRINTS AND POSTERS
An affordable way to hang a Heade on your walls is to buy a print or poster, typically costing $15 to $35 unframed. Allposters.com (www.allposters.com) offers over 50 Heade prints. Vintage Art Gallery & Frames (www.vintageartgallery.com) has more than 70 Heade prints, priced from $20 to $50 unframed.

If you would like to see an original Heade, more than 50 museums across the country display his works, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (www.mfa.org), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (www.lacma.org), and the Art Institute of Chicago (www.artic.edu).