The Luckiest Man Ever Wins a $1 Million Picasso Painting for $138

Pennsylvania resident goes home with an original Picasso after buying a raffle ticket.

Image via HuffPost

Jeffrey Gonano's got a golden ticket—the winning ticket to the Paris raffle, that is.

Although his prize wasn't a tour of Charlie's chocolate factory, it's still the stuff of dreams. Out of 50,000 $138 tickets sold to benefit a Lebanese charity, the Pennsylvania man won the grand prize of an original Picasso worth $1 million. 

The work is a 1915 piece titled Man in the Opera Hat done in opaque gouache in the Cubist master's signature style.

Gonano, who work's for his family's fire sprinkler business, doesn't know if he wants to keep the valuable work in his home in Wexford, Pa. "Maybe I'll lend it to a museum and let them put it on display rather than putting it in a vault, so other people can enjoy it," he told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "It all depends. I don't know what the taxes are or anything."

Overall, the raffle, which was hosted by Sotheby's, raked in close to $3.5 million for the International Association to Save Tyre, a UNESCO heritage site in Lebanon that was devastated last year. 

RELATED: 20 Things You Didn't Know About Picasso

[via HuffPost]

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