Pawn Stars: How Magritte Paintings Drew Rick Harrison Into A $10K Loss

Gamblers from all around the world travel to Las Vegas in the hopes of winning it big. It's only appropriate, then, that "Pawn Stars" icon Rick Harrison, who calls the glittering city home, takes some major risks on certain items. Sadly, he ended up on the losing end of a gamble in Season 21's "A Surreally Good Deal." In this episode, a seller appears to bring in a nigh-legendary piece: a rare painting by famed French artist René Magritte. This would be a huge prize; as Icon Fine Arts owner Chad Sampson put it, "René Magritte was one of the founders of the Surrealist Movement — like [Salvador] Dali ... [His work is] very dreamlike [and] very weird." Even if you're not an art buff, you might be familiar with his work — he's the guy who painted the portrait of the suited man with the apple in front of his face, the kissing lovers with white cloths on their faces, and the pipe that declares, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."

Multiple elements seemed to indicate the painting — which featured a tree with three doors opening to blue skies — was authentic. But Sampson could not fully determine if it was real. He 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.

Was the "Pawn Stars" Magritte paining real? The answer is, simply, no — but getting there was complicated. During his examination of the painting, Chad Sampson made one thing clear: Despite his expertise, he was out of his league. "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 came in a simple and unequivocal letter Harrison received when he picked up the painting: "The committee met yesterday and is of the opinion that the work presented is not a work by René Magritte."

This 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. Sometimes the "Pawn Stars" guys get ripped off, and sometimes they don't. That's life in the pawn shop game — and in Las Vegas at large.