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$135 Picasso: Man wins $1 million painting with $135 raffle ticket

Pennsylvania's Jeffrey Gonano won Pablo Picasso’s “Man With Opera Hat.”

By Kate Stanton

Dec. 19 (UPI) -- Talk about a good investment.

Jeffrey Gonano, a 25-year-old project manager at a fire sprinkler firm in Pennsylvania, paid 100 euros (about $135) for a ticket in a charity raffle run by Sotheby's auction house in Paris. He won Pablo Picasso's painting, "Man With Opera Hat," which has an estimated value of $1 million.

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Olivier Widmaier Picasso, one of the famed artist's grandsons, sold 50,000 raffle tickets to benefit the International Association to Save Tyre, an organization that raises money for the war-damaged southern Lebanese city and Unesco World Heritage site.

“This was very important to me because this city is one of the places where the idea of Western civilization originated,” Olivier said of his charity scheme. “I think my grandfather would have been seduced by the idea of helping such a place.”

Gonano plans to keep the painting.

[Telegraph, New York Times]

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