For years, a small religious picture hung in an elderly woman's kitchen in northern France. It was on the wall between the kitchen and the dining area, just above a hotplate used for cooking.
Her family considered it special. But they took it for an icon, a traditional religious image.
She herself thought it was just an old copy. She could not even remember how it had come into the family. Its place was above the stove, and there it stayed.
In June 2019, the woman, by then in her nineties, was selling her house and moving away. The house, built in the 1960s, stood in Compiegne, a town north of Paris.
She called in a local auctioneer to see whether anything she owned was worth selling. Whatever was not would be thrown away. Most of her belongings were headed for the dump.
The auctioneer was Philomene Wolf, 32, from the auction house Acteon in the nearby town of Senlis. She had set up her own business only the year before.
It was a routine job: value what could be sold, and clear out the rest. It also came with a deadline.
“I had a week to give an expert view on the house contents and empty it,” Wolf said.
So she worked her way through the house, room by room. In the kitchen, she came to the little picture above the hotplate.
It was about 26 centimeters (ten inches) tall, a religious scene painted on a wooden panel. Something about it made Wolf take a closer look.