Business Notes

For three decades, the somber-hued oil painting of flowers in a vase hung uncelebrated in the living room of a suburban Milwaukee couple. But last summer, as husband and wife cleared away a lifetime of domestic clutter, they called in an auctioneer's agent. His discovery, disclosed last week: the seemingly undistinguished still life was something any avid art collector would give his left ear to own -- a genuine Vincent van Gogh.

The painting, signed with a solitary V, is apparently a work that Van Gogh painted in Paris in 1886. By 1930 it belonged to a Swiss banker, and it was later bequeathed to his Milwaukee relatives. When Chicago's Leslie Hindman auction house puts the painting on the block in March, the obscure work could fetch as much as $800,000. Its discovery has sent fortune hunters rummaging through their attics, hoping to strike oils.