Pawn Stars: How Magritte Paintings Drew Rick Harrison Into A $10K Loss
Las Vegas, of course, is the setting of the hit History series "Pawn Stars," an appropriate city considering the big gambles pawn dealer Rick Harrison takes when purchasing items that may or may not be authentic. Unfortunately, Harrison found himself on the losing end of the gamble in a segment of the Season 21 episode "A Surreally Good Deal" in June 2023, where a prospective seller brought in what he believed to be a rare painting by famed French artist René Magritte.
To validate whether the Magritte painting was real, Harrison recruited Icon Fine Arts owner Chad Sampson, who explained the painter's importance to the art world. "René Magritte was one of the founders of the Surrealist Movement — like [Salvador] Dali," Sampson explained to Harrison in the episode. "[His work is] very dreamlike [and] very weird."
While several elements pointed toward the painting — which features a tree with three doors opening to blue skies — being authentic, Sampson could not 100 percent determine if it was real. Sampson concluded that it could be fake and worth nothing, or it could be valued at millions of dollars, noting that an $800,000 painting 20 years ago could be worth $3.8 million today. As such, Harrison gave the seller two choices. The seller could take home $10,000 and have Harrison assume all the risk, or he could get the Magritte painting validated by experts and pay him $400,000. "I'm straight-up gambling here, and I could lose all the money," Harrison told the seller. Unwilling to take the gamble, the seller accepted Harrison's $10,000 offer.
Harrison and Chumlee traveled to Belgium to get the ruling on the painting's authenticity
During his examination of the painting purportedly created by René Magritte — whose more famous works include "The Menaced Assassin" and "The False Mirror" — art dealer Chad Sampson was completely clear that the final authentication of the painting was far above his pay grade. "The bad news is my opinion means nothing," Sampson told Harrison. "The only opinion that matters is the René Magritte Committee in Belgium. You have to take it unframed to Belgium, but you have to get the authentication."
After sending the painting to the Magritte Foundation in Belgium for examination, Harrison and fellow "Pawn Stars" dealer Austin "Chumlee" Russell hopped a plane to Europe to get the final verdict from the eight-member Magritte committee. The final word on the authenticity of the painting came in a letter Harrison received when he picked up the item from the foundation, which he read out loud to Chumlee while sitting on a park bench nearby. In it, the foundation simply wrote, "The committee met yesterday and is of the opinion that the work presented is not a work by René Magritte."
The Magritte painting wasn't the first time Russell was tempted by a work of art, and certainly not the last. In the Season 19 episode "The Prince of Pawn," Harrison passed on a Prince painting that's causing a huge fan debate because it has not been authenticated to be by the late music icon. On the flip side, a $5,500 "Pawn Stars" gamble paid off in a big way in Season 5 when a rare item by German printmaker Albrecht Dürer was appraised to be worth anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000.