Remember when Baltimore native Martha Fuqua bought a long-lost Renoir painting at a flea market for $7, and it turned out to be worth between $75,000 and $100,000? Well, it looks like it was the basis for last night’s Simpsons episode, “The War of Art.”
Here’s the TV Guide synopsis: “Marge and Homer get a bargain on a painting at the Van Houten’s yard sale, and later learn that it is a masterpiece worth $100,000, so they wrestle with splitting the money with their neighbors or keeping it all.”
Of course, in real life, the painting wound up at the Baltimore Museum of Art, from which it had been stolen in 1951. And Fuqua’s flea-market story became dubious. It appears that The Simpsons left it less legally complicated.
