La Jolla Map Dealer Strikes It Rich With Rare Find

LOS ANGELES — Alex Clausen has struck it rich with a rare find. The La Jolla map dealer didn’t find hidden treasure, or stake a claim on a mine producing tons of gold. Clausen found his treasure on an unassuming piece of paper that turned out to be a map worth $7.5 million.

The 35-year-old Clausen was looking at a virtual tour of an estate sale for oil heir Gordon Getty and his wife, Ann, “an avid collector” who died in 2020, when he found a type of antiquated nautical map known as a portolan chart, “Tucked between a George II mahogany breakfront secretaire bookcase and a series of manuscript and watercolor maps showing the waterways of Venice,” a Los Angeles Times story reported.

According to that article, the chart, which the estate sale dated between 1500 and 1525, caught Clausen’s eye.

“It wasn’t like the chairs, lamps and things that surrounded it,” Clausen told the LA Times.

The estimated price, between $100,000 and $150,000, seemed fitting for a portolan chart from the 16th century, the LA Times said.

"But finding out the exact age, and how much the chart was truly worth, took Clausen on a months-long historical journey," the LA Times said.

"The first known reference to the chart came from Italian scholar Pietro Amat di San Filippo, who saw the map in the library of a Corsini family palace in Florence in 1888 and included mention of it in an article he wrote for the Italian Geographic Society," the LA Times said. "The scholar tentatively dated it from 1347 to 1354."

The map changed hands numerous times before Ann and Gordon Getty purchased it in 1993 for about 56,500 British pounds or then the equivalent of $85,000.

The couple restored the map and hung it in the library of their San Francisco townhouse, where it remained for years until Clausen and the team from Barry Lawrence Ruderman, where Clausen works, purchased it for just over $239,000.

After hundreds of hours of research, which included sending the map to a New York lab that used a scientific approach to date it, Clausen and his team finally dated the map to 1360.

The Barry Lawrence Ruderman antique map shop is listing the chart, now dubbed the Rex Tholomeus Portolan Chart of 1360, for $7.5 million.

Read the full story on the Los Angeles Times website here.