An Easton woman paid $12 for a charcoal drawing in a Montco auction. She is convinced it’s an original Renoir.

It was a pretty routine day in January when antiques shop owner Heidi Markow attended an auction in Montgomery County and walked away with a framed charcoal nude drawing for just $12.

After hours of grueling research and encouraging signs from an expert, she believes the artwork is an original drawing by the French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

A certified antiques appraiser, Markow runs the 16-year-old shop Salvage Goods in Easton with her business partner Rick Higgins and her son Carl Paolina. The team often hunts for treasures across the region in estate sales and auctions, focusing mostly on antiques, vintage items, and furniture.

“I typically do not do art [appraisals]; however, I’m trained enough to know what is, or what could potentially be, worth something,” said Markow. “I said to both my son and Rick, ‘Hey guys, I have to tell you, I think we have a real Renoir here.’ And they brushed it off, because, you know, who would even believe such a thing?”

At first glance, Markow had no idea of the work’s potential significance. It’s typical for her to scour auctions and estate sales for hidden gems, and in this case she traveled a little further away from Easton than usual. (Markow did not disclose more identifying details about the auction organizers or location, citing a small and tight-knit antiques community in the region.)

She didn’t even touch the piece, or see a signature, before deciding to bid on it — she was simply drawn to the image and added it to a list of items she wanted. It was only when she got home and gave it a closer look that she realized it could be a major find. That’s when the detective work began.

Markow has spent the last two months closely studying clues in the charcoal drawing, estimating that she’s put in 1,000 hours of research so far. That includes analyzing the drawing style, the paper, and the frame, researching the provenance, and cross-checking the signature, which she believes says “Renoir.” The artist frequently drew female nudes throughout his career, often focusing on women bathing and using towels, like in the drawing Markow found.

On the back of the frame, there’s a major clue: A sticker with the name of New York-based art importer Samuel Fields and Company and of Louis C. Madeira IV, once a legendary curator of European decorative arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Madeira name is particularly noteworthy, given the family’s prominence in the Philadelphia arts community and their star-studded art collection, some of which they donated to PMA. Helen Tyson Madeira, a well-respected philanthropist who married Louis C. Madeira IV, came from a family of impressionist art collectors who gifted a trove of significant works — including Renoir’s The Large Bathers and Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers — to the museum in 1963. After her death in 2014, Madeira also bequeathed paintings by giants like Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro to PMA.

“The family were titans of art collecting,” she said. “I would be hard-pressed to be convinced, with this provenance, that the Madeira family would have brought in a fake piece of art from Europe.”

Markow admits this effort to assess the drawing’s legitimacy is “out of my league” because she’s not a Renoir expert. So she started by contacting reputable auction houses Bonhams and Sotheby’s, and received a referral to a veteran art appraiser; he approved of her research methods and suggested she take the next step and send the piece to the Wildenstein Plattner Institute in New York.

The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, a nonprofit foundation, specializes in publishing comprehensive digital catalogs of certain artists’ work verified by art historians and other expert scholars. Its artists includes names like Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, and Romare Bearden, in addition to Renoir. The organization invites collectors to submit artworks for review and to potentially include in the artist’s catalog.

(Markow also reached out to PMA and the Barnes Foundation, which holds the largest collection of Renoir paintings in the world but did not receive a response. The Barnes Foundation does not appraise or verify authenticity of artworks, and a spokesperson said PMA conservators typically need significant time to authenticate artworks.)

On April 10, Markow will deliver the drawing to WPI for examination. If it turns out to be Renoir, she said, Bonhams has offered to sell the artwork in an auction in May, where it could potentially fetch a six- to seven-figure sum.

After the whirlwind of excitement surrounding her discovery and investigation, Markow isn’t entirely sure if she would want to sell the piece, but she’s eager to hear insights from Renoir scholars. For now, she’s keeping the work in a safe.

“I saw a dauntingly beautiful, lifelike dark nude, a beautiful woman, posed elegantly on a towel,” she said about the moment she saw the artwork. “I felt that she actually reached for me.”

As Markow awaits the experts’ verdict, there’s another big question she can’t answer just yet: How did this potential Renoir resurface in Montgomery County, selling for the price of a sandwich?