Creepy family statue is actually a Rodin

A 14-inch version of the Rodin statue entitled 'Despair' had been sitting for years in the Tillson family house, next to the cage of a gerbil, the children's pet.

The bronze sculpture, representing a woman sitting with her legs crossed 'kind of freaked me out', recalls Elizabeth Tillson, remembering that she thought the statue was 'creepy' when she was a child.

After going through some authentication issues, the statue was finally declared to be an original Rodin an it will be auctioned tomorrow in Washington, USA. The sale could bring the Tillson siblings as much as $200,000.

How the statue came into possession of the Tillson family remains unknown, the only known fact being that their late grandfather obtained it sometime before 1960.

Authentication was rather difficult as the statue did not present the usual Rodin marks, such as the double signature (it only had one Rodin signature) or the mark of the foundry that cast it. Moreover, the Musée Rodin from Paris held no records of the statue.

But the Tillson siblings pushed forward to solve the statue's mystery and asked Matthew Quinn, from Quinn's Auction Galleries, for a second opinion. After he decided to remove the block foundation the statue was mounted on, Quinn discovered a second Rodin signature. When he showed the statue to the head of Comité Auguste Rodin, a Paris organization that is cataloging the artist's works, the expert knew 'within 15 seconds' that the sculpture was an original.

The expert's only regret is that the family do not know how the statue reached them.