A woman thinks she got the bargain of a lifetime at an auction in January.

Heidi Markow owns an antique shop in Easton, Pennsylvania, and attended an auction earlier this year to buy items for her store.

“There were paintings that were going for $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 as they moved down the line. And this was just sitting there,” Markow said of the drawing.

The artwork is 17.5-by-16.5 inches and depicts a woman.

“I didn’t know what it was, I just knew that I wanted it,” Markow said. “This piece just stood out to me as something special.”

She paid only $12 for it but when she took a close look at it, she noticed a faint signature which read Pierre-Auguste Renoir. That’s the name of the famous French artist and Impressionist painter.

A label on the back of the artwork said it came from a Philadelphia art collector who donated it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Markow believes that it is a drawing dating to the late 1800s and is a portrait of Renoir’s wife, Aliene Charigot during his Ingres period and a time when “he paid a lot of attention to light and shading.”

Renoir died in 1919.

An appraiser recommended by the auction house Sotheby’s told her it was a real Renoir, adding, “Congratulations.”

She hopes to find out if it is real when she takes to the Wildenstein Plattner Institute to get it examined.

If WPI does believe it is real, the non-profit will add it to its Catalogue Raisonné. The review is scheduled for April 10.

“It’s rigorous, they’re pretty tough with their examination. I’m cautiously optimistic,” Markow said.

If it is real, she plans to sell it to someone who could showcase it and thinks it could bring in potentially “six figures, seven figures.”

“It’s absolutely beautiful, there’s so much detail in this that it deserves to be somewhere where it can be seen,” she said.

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