Paintings sold for US$45 at estate sale spark fight over millions
Dozens of Chinese paintings sold for US$45 to US$275 each are at the centre of a court bid in Oregon to reverse the sale.
John Moody, who filed the case, says one ink scroll showing a galloping horse may have been painted by the Chinese artist Xu Beihong. Works by Xu Beihong have sold at auction for up to US$41.9m, according to reporting by The Art Newspaper. That gap is the dispute.
The complaint does not target the estate-sale company, the business hired to clear and sell belongings after a death. Instead it alleges the buyers "knowingly" took advantage of a selling agent's failure to understand the value of rare Chinese art. Provenance, the documented chain of ownership, and who knew what at the time of sale are now questions for the court.
The case is one of several estate fallouts examined in a feature by Riah Pryor published on 5 October 2026. The article, titled "Estate fallouts expose challenges of posthumous art ownership", looks at recent United States lawsuits over pricing, permission and posthumous prints, meaning works made after an artist's death.
In April, a jury in Manhattan in New York awarded US$102m in damages to the Morgan Art Foundation, the former agent for Robert Indiana. The jury found against a publisher accused of making and selling unauthorised works. Unauthorised here means without approval from the estate or rights holder.
Another dispute ended in agreement rather than a verdict. Relatives of the late photographer Mike Disfarmer reached a settlement with the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Arkansas over copyright in hundreds of posthumous prints. Copyright, the legal right to copy and sell an image, was at issue after allegations of "illegal profiting".
In Canada, sentencing in the Norval Morrisseau forgery trial was delayed in March. The delay followed a claim by the lawyer for Jeff Cowan that the deceased artist's estate was complicit in forgeries.
Bad planning is often part of the pattern. The Observer reported in August on how artists' estates become tangled in lawsuits when wills, inventories and rights are left unclear.
What makes this stand out is the scale of the paperwork error alleged in Oregon. A sale measured in tens of dollars could turn on authentication, agency and a single attribution to Xu Beihong.
