Finders, Not Keepers: The $35 Goodwill Bust

In 2018, the owner of Austin vintage business, Laura Young, bought a marble bust at a local Goodwill store for $34.99. She loved it and claimed it “ he looked Roman” and “old”. After a few years of research, a Sotheby’s consultant confirmed that Laura was right. The bust that Laura bought was about 2,000 years old and supposedly depicts Sextus Pompey who was the son of Pompey the Great, the one who fought against Julius Caesar. 

This ancient, Roman bust had a home and it was not at home in Austin Texas with Laura Young. Its earliest record is in King Ludwig I of Bavaria’s 1833 inventory. This bust was displayed in the Pompejanum, a replica of a Pompeian villa in Aschaffenburg, Germany. A bombing damaged the building during World War II and when the villa was restored in the 1960s the bust was nowhere to be found. Experts have an inkling that a U.S soldier stationed nearby brought it home. 

This raises a question: if you buy stolen art without knowing it was stolen, is it yours? According to U.S law, it is usually not yours. Because “a thief cannot convey good title,” buyers after Laura are not protected from the rightful owners claim, even if they acted in good faith. Goodwill had no right to sell the bust, so young had no right to keep it. She called the experience of buying and returning the stolen item “bittersweet since I knew I couldn’t keep or sell the bust” and continues to say “Either way, I’m glad I got to be a small part of [its] long and complicated history, and he looked great in the house while I had him.” 

From a marketing perspective, this story exposes hidden risk. Thrifting is sold as a treasure hunt, and resale apps and “thrift haul” content turn lucky finds into an income. The catch is that second hand stores do not check where their donations came from. A $35 price tag tells you what something costs, not the history behind where it has been.

On the other hand, you could argue that Young did everything right. She paid for the bust, spent years researching her new art piece and could have quietly sold it privately. Germany had not found the bust in over 70 years, so why would the honest buyer take the loss? The law even admits that time matters in some cases since “an elapsed statue of limitations may furnish a defense.” But, if every sale cleaned a stolen objects history, theft would just become a waiting game.

The San Antonio Museum of Art displayed the bust for about a year before it returned to Germany in May 2023. Young said, “He’d been hidden for 70 to 80 years, I thought he deserved to be seen and studied.” NBC News. In my opinion, returning it was right, but honestly there was a personal choice that went into this whole thing, not something the system guaranteed. The coverage does not mention any reward to Laura Young. If the art world wants more finders to come forward, doing the right thing should not feel like a loss.