A New York photography dealer has found what he believes is an unsigned early self-portrait by Andy Warhol.

Addison Thompson, who deals in hand-painted photographs, saw the drawing in a lot of a dozen framed paintings and drawings in an estate sale last October at Tepper Galleries. The drawing — which shows a seated boy, drawn in pen and ink, with a blue-and-white chair and a dark blue background painted in gouache — struck him immediately as looking like a Warhol from the 1950s, when Warhol was experimenting with techniques that he learned as a commercial artist.

“It hit me like a boxcar,” Mr. Thompson said of his first impression of the drawing. “When I examined it, I became very excited. I re-examined it a couple of times, and then I faded away because I didn’t want to draw too much attention to it.” He ended up paying $80 for the whole lot.

“I think I’m very lucky” to have found it, Mr. Thompson said. “The next stop would have been the garbage can.”

Mr. Thompson plans to bring the drawing before the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board when it next reviews submissions, in March. In the meantime, he sent an image by e-mail to a well-known artist who was a close friend of Warhol’s in the latter’s early days as an illustrator.

The artist, who asked not to be named because he didn’t want to be besieged with requests to authenticate other potential Warhols, said in an e-mail to The New York Sun that the drawing looked “very much as I remember drawings by Andy Warhol looked” in the 1950s.

The Sun e-mailed an image of the drawing to the director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pa., Thomas Sokolowski, who also said he thought it looked like a Warhol. He said it resembled a piece in the museum’s collection, which shows a woman “drawn in this sketchy mode” against a red backdrop, so that, as in the drawing in Mr. Thompson’s possession, “the image of the sitter looks very ghostlike.”

Mr. Thompson believes that the drawing is a self-portrait traced from a childhood photograph of Warhol. He pointed out to a reporter faint smudges of lead under the ink lines, which he believes resulted from Warhol’s having traced the photograph on another piece of paper and then transferred the tracing onto this one.

Mr. Sokolowski said he knew of no other instances of Warhol doing a self-portrait from a childhood photograph, but “that’s not to say it’s impossible.” He also said the boy looked “a little beefier” than Warhol.

So far Mr. Thompson has not been able to establish a provenance for the drawing. He said he asked Tepper Galleries for the source of the lot, but the auction house said that the seller did not want to be contacted.

Both Mr. Sokolowski and the artist who was friends with Warhol said that, during his days as a commercial artist, Warhol frequently gave drawings away.

“Andy gave away his work freely to friends and to art directors of the agencies who gave him jobs, and often staff members of those agencies just kept the drawings as souvenirs,” the artist said in an email.

Mr. Sokolowski, who years ago curated an exhibition of Warhol’s early work at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, said: “A lot of that early stuff was found in the hands of people with whom Warhol worked at the various magazines he did illustrations for. He also made illustrations for cosmetics and various other products.”

The drawing in Mr. Thompson’s possession “could have been an illustration done for hair cream for little boys,” Mr. Sokolowski said. “Somebody could have said, ‘We’re not going to use it in this campaign, but it looks like my grandson,’ and then kept it.”

Mr. Thompson has one other piece of circumstantial evidence to present to the authentication board. On the drawing’s original backing is scrawled a name that seems to correspond to one of Warhol’s early commercial clients. Mr. Thompson asked the Sun to withhold the name, because he doesn’t want someone to step forward and claim the painting.

Asked then why he is seeking publicity for his discovery, Mr. Thompson said he wanted the drawing to get the recognition it deserved.

“There’s so much bad news in the world,” he said. “I’m just trying to bring something really great to light. Just think: How many Van Gogh self-portraits are there? How many Warhol self-portraits are there? Not many. And if this is a Warhol, it’s the only self-portrait of him as a young boy. If this is a Warhol, it’s going to be very important that it’s discovered.”