Ari Hodara bought his ticket over the weekend, on a whim. Ticket number 94,715 cost him €100. On Tuesday, Christie’s auction house in Paris video-called to tell him he was now the owner of a Pablo Picasso original worth more than €1 million.

“How do I know this isn’t a prank?” the 58-year-old engineer asked.

Fair question. The art market is a place where eight-figure canvases change hands between people who name yachts after themselves. A regular person walking away with a Picasso for roughly the price of a nice dinner for two is not how things usually work.

But this was a charity raffle, not an auction room. More than 120,000 tickets were sold across 52 countries at €100 ($118) apiece, raising around €11 million for France’s Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, according to organizers. The odds of winning — roughly one in 120,000 — were considerably better than most lotteries, and the prize considerably more refined.

The painting, Tête de femme (“Head of a Woman”), is a 1941 gouache on paper depicting Picasso’s partner and muse, the surrealist artist Dora Maar. Rendered in inky greys and blues, it measures just 38.9 by 25.4 centimetres — small enough to carry home under one arm, valuable enough to fund years of medical research.

Of the money raised, €1 million goes to Opera Gallery, the painting’s owner, with the remainder donated to the Alzheimer’s foundation. The raffle’s organizer, French journalist Peri Cochin, has run two previous editions — one in 2013, won by a 25-year-old Pennsylvania man, and another in 2020, claimed by an Italian accountant who received her ticket as a Christmas gift from her son.

Hodara, an art enthusiast who lives in the city where Picasso spent much of his working life, said he was simply surprised. “When you bet on this, you don’t expect to win.”

This time, he did.

Sources