THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

The painting had sat unnoticed and passed over for years. It was dismissed. It was ignored. Nobody cared that it was beautiful because of its dubious history. For years it had been housed as part of a private collection in an estate in Scotland. Nobody cared about it because it was said to be a fake. The painting, credited as a copy for years to a minor artist named Innocenzo Fancucci da Imola, had been valued at $26 in 1899 (about $2,600 in today’s prices).

The painting caught the eye of art expert Dr. Benor Grosvenor during the filming of a BBC television series while he was looking at other artwork. “I thought, crikey, it looks like a Raphael,” Grosvenor told reporters. That fact would bring the value of the painting up to an estimated $26 million.

That would be quite the turnaround for a painting that has been disregarded and treated as virtually worthless for hundreds of years

Many of us go through life feeling the same way. Worthless, dismissed, and ignored. We place our value in our jobs or our possessions and we compare ourselves to those around us only to always come up wanting. The problem is that we, like this painting, are being unfairly appraised.

Our value is not found in ourselves, instead, our value is in the artist who created us.