A valuable painting left in a Goodwill donation bin fetched $11,205 in an online auction Wednesday.
The painting went up for sale last week after Maria Rivera, a sharp-eyed Goodwill employee in Manassas, realized that the painting seemed special.
Turned out she was right: The work was by Italian painter Giovanni Battista Torriglia, a late 19th-century artist whose portraits hang in galleries around the world.
"It's the real deal," Rivera told News4's Richard Jordan.
It's possible that when the donor dropped off the painting at the Manassas store and donation center, he or she had no idea that it was so valuable. But since ownership would have been difficult to prove, Goodwill put it up for online auction last week.
The organization says it will use the unusual find to help support its core mission of providing education and job training to the community's most vulnerable people.
