Washington, DC, Hour 2

MARK WALBERG: Welcome to Antiques Roadshow, this week from Washington, D.C.

They were auctioning things off as fast as they could.

I bought a couple of piles of stuff, and in one of the piles were these two.

(chuckling) That's pretty astonishing.

Whoo!

Okay.

(laughing) You can live with that?

I can.

Stay tuned as Roadshow discovers Washington's hidden treasures, coming up right now.

♪ ♪ (firecrackers exploding) ANNOUNCER: Now, the people who make Antiques Roadshow possible.

Welcome to Antiques Roadshow.

Hi, I'm Mark Walberg, in Washington, D.C.

The greatest leaders of our nation have called the federal district home, but did you know this city was also home to some of America's greatest band leaders?

Duke Ellington and John Philip Sousa were originally from Washington.

Let's see what swingin' treasures have marched through our doors.

Take a look.

MAN: I bought it at a flea market in Gloucester, Virginia.

I had seen it maybe a week prior to when I had bought it.

I went home and I thought about it and I came back the following week and the lady still had it.

And I told her I was going to the Antiques Roadshow, so...

I said I needed something to take.

I said, "That looks like the ticket right there."

The lady, she was hesitant, but she sold it to me.

And you paid how much for it?

I paid $70.

Well, those are, I guess, penguins walking around the side of it.

The lady who sold it to me told me that a professor had told her that they're rockhopper penguins from Antarctica.

Well, what I don't know about penguins is a lot, but I think I know a few things about this piece.

This is a piece of Avon pottery from Wheeling, West Virginia, dating to about 1902 or 1903.

There's no artist signature on it, there's no mark on the bottom of the piece, and often Avon is not marked.

But there are several things that denote this as an Avon piece.

Number one, the shape is an Avon shape.

They did not make that much art pottery, and they had relatively few shapes in production for the two years they were making art pottery at this level.

They did a number of different types of designs at Avon, mostly floral designs, but when I saw the penguins, I knew it was the work of Frederick Rhead.

He was a young man who was hired away from the Wardle Company in England, where he was the art director at 19 years of age.

His friend William P. Jervis was working at Avon and hired Rhead to come to the United States, where Rhead stayed for the rest of his career.

And Rhead went on from Avon to Roseville to Weller to his own pottery in Santa Barbara to Homer Laughlin, where he designed Fiesta ware.

So Rhead was a pretty famous guy.

But early on, Rhead was doing his own stuff, and this is a piece that Rhead decorated with squeeze-bag technique.

There's slip-trail outlines to the decoration.

There's also what we call sgraffito technique, where he actually incises lines and then works within those lines, almost like a cloisonné technique.

So this has all the earmarks of Frederick Rhead's decorative techniques and decorative style.

But one of those elements is the weirdness of it, it's a kind of quirky, English-American Arts and Crafts style.

This one is crude in a very sophisticated way.

You can see the way the glaze is uneven on the piece.

The birds are not all consistent because they're hand done.

Some are pudgier than others.

A very unusual, peculiar and, I find, oddly appealing piece of Rhead's work at Avon Pottery.

The fact that it's not marked or not signed really doesn't matter much, because people who know Rhead's work know what this is, and his signature is in the work.

At auction, I would estimate this for between $2,000 and $3,000 and probably more like $2,500 to $3,500.

But to be a little conservative, I think $2,000 to $3,000 at auction is what this piece would be worth.

Well, I did good.

You did really well.

WOMAN: It belonged to my Uncle Rip.

After he passed away, his wife acquired it and kept it all together.

And then after she passed away, it went to her son and then I bought it from him.

My cousin had a storage unit down in North Carolina, and it was getting ready to go for auction and I just happened to find out through a casual conversation with my mother that that was getting ready to happen, so I called him and I said, "I'll give you a thousand dollars for everything in the unit, but I want the cigarette box."

And he said, "Well, okay."

You had mentioned that your uncle had gone to school with JFK.

Yes.

And so they had been lifelong friends.

Yes.

And through that he met Bobby and Ted, and that it was really a wonderful family relationship.

We get an awful lot of autographed letters on the show, especially presidential.

And most of the Bobby things are almost always autopen or secretarial signatures.

So it's very unusual to see something that in fact has a signature that is authentic.

We have two letters here.

They're on the same stationery.

They're dated only about a year difference, but one, the content is about Equal Employment Opportunity Conference.

And this is a very kind of common, less sexy topic, but because it has a beautiful signature on it makes it more valuable.

And then the other letter is referencing JFK, and that's terrific.

Tell me a little bit about why the letters are charred on the edges.

They were damaged in the house fire that my Uncle Rip lost his life in.

Normally, condition is something that you take into account to discount the value of something, but in this particular case, it adds to the authenticity of it.

The first letter, because of the content, is going to be about $300 to $500.

The second letter, interesting enough, because of the reference to JFK, even though it's not signed by JFK, is going to be about $750 to $1,000.

Wow.

So, what's important is what it says.

Uh-huh.

So let's get to the box here.

It's a silver cigarette box.

What was this for?

It was a wedding gift to my aunt and uncle.

There were a lot of presents given from presidents to different people, but the fact that it is from the president and his wife and dated the same year of his passing makes it really a wonderful collector's item.

As a piece of silver, this is about an $80 to $100 box.

As a piece of Kennedy memorabilia, this is going to be worth, at auction, about $10,000 to $15,000.

Seriously?

Seriously.

I inherited this from my grandparents 30 years ago and they were from Hagerstown, Maryland.

How did they get the table?

He was a minister, and they didn't have a whole lot, so, you know, a lot of things their parishioners gave them.

And you know what it's used for?

I was guessing it was a game table of some kind.

Exactly.

In the 18th century, games tables or card tables, we call them, like this with a hinged leaf Right.

so the legs swing out in the back and you can play games on, were really popular.

Your table is very English looking.

It looks like a George III table because of the quality.

Look at this beautiful mahogany, all this inlay.

This is actually cherrywood, an American wood, Okay.

these little bellflowers.

And if we turn the table over this way, we can identify the secondary woods.

Okay.

And this is where it gets sort of fun.

You see these back rails?

Yes.

Those are made of American oak.

And they're double swing rails.

And that's a typical Maryland characteristic.

Oh, okay.

And I believe that because of the double swing rails as well as the very distinctive inlay that it's not Baltimore, made right in the city, but western Maryland.

Okay.

This is a very rare western Maryland Federal games table, made about 1795 or 1800.

This is all white pine, by the way.

Okay.

See that number?

That's the number "2."

Oh!

So there was originally a pair.

If you can find the other one, you know, you'd really have something.

Huh.

But on its own, this is an amazing table.

We judge tables like this on the basis of proportion.

And the quality is amazing.

I mean, this leaf weighs a ton.

Right.

It's really dense.

Beautiful stripe, book-match wood.

The condition is unbelievable.

This is the original finish.

Okay.

Which you know we love.

Right.

And collectors love.

The market for card tables has gone down a bit.

Not what it used to be.

Except for tables like this.

Okay.

I would say at auction, this would be in the range of $6,000 to about $9,000.

Oh, very good.

Very nice.

MAN: I found it in my parents' basement when I was clearing out their house about 25 years ago, and it's sat in my basement since then, and I occasionally use it to, um... split kindling.

Mm-hmm.

But, uh, we were down at the American Indian Museum last fall and I noticed they had an exhibit there of tomahawks.

And they looked very similar to this, so I thought, "Oh, gee, maybe this is something more than just your ordinary garden tool."

It is, in fact, probably very similar to what you saw at the Smithsonian.

Mm-hmm.

It's a trade ax with a pipe bowl on it that was probably made in England, or possibly France.

The tomahawk head would have been traded to the Indians, and the Indians would have made their own handle.

These were used from the 1750s right to the end of the Indian Wars in 1900.

This one's particularly beautiful, and you can date it by the style of blade, the way it curves down here, the tulip-style pipe bowl.

It was a smoker, because you can slide this down and see a hole there that it was used to smoke with.

There would have been a plug on the end to hold the smoke in.

But it's a beautifully detailed bowl.

The nice thing about the blade on this, it has a maker's mark.

It looks like it says, "Papin," and you can do some homework on that, take a rubbing off of it, and I would guess you'd probably be able to find out who that was and when he worked.

Mm-hmm, right.

But it was traded probably late 18th, early 19th century to the Indians.

It would have been a highly coveted piece.

Oh.

Okay.

So you don't want to chop any more wood with it.

Okay, so I shouldn't sharpen it, then.

That would be my advice, yes.

As far as value, at auction a tomahawk like this, because it's in such beautiful condition, would probably bring about $8,000 to $10,000.

Oh!

So it is worth something, then.

Yes, it is worth something.

Okay.

MAN: It's been in my family for generations.

It was supposedly made by my great-great-great-grandfather.

It was handed down to my grandfather and then to my father and to me.

Supposedly it was made with Jules Jurgensen.

I think he was a jeweler from Massachusetts.

The watch was on display in Massachusetts for a long time.

Other than that, I have very little history about it other than what's in the letter.

So the letter was written, you believe, somewhere in the 1940s?

Late 1940s.

And the signature at the bottom is your grandfather's signature.

That would be my grandfather's signature.

It talks about the watch.

The watch is a masterpiece of horology.

Yeah.

It's a perpetual calendar.

It knows how many days are in each month, and on the fourth year, one gear ends up knowing that it has 29 days in February.

Right.

It also is a minute repeater, which means it chimes in a succession to the nearest minute.

Wow.

(chiming) It would ring hour bells, then quarter-hour bells, and then minute bells.

Okay.

It also shows the phase of the moon.

It also has another function, which is a chronometer that you can time something with.

The case is made out of 18-karat gold.

It's a hunting case.

When you open the watch up in the back, there's an exhibition cover which then shows the entire movement.

There's an issue I have with the letter.

The letter says that the watch was 140 years old when the letter was written.

The watch, though, was probably produced between 1880 to 1890.

So if it was written in the '40s, then the watch was about 60 years old.

When we see something where one thing is off, then we have to wonder, are there other things that are off?

So it says in the letter that your great-grandfather, I guess, was a watchmaker working with Jules Jurgensen.

Now, Jules Jurgensen was a preeminent watchmaker in Copenhagen.

He worked from in the 1850s to the 1890s.

The firm stayed around for years.

They were noted for very, very fine watches, also, like this, very, very heavy 18-karat gold.

The watch has the feel of what a Jurgensen could be.

Mm-hmm.

The price of the watch as is, with having a disparity in the date on the letter and as if it was not made by Jules Jurgensen, the value on the retail market would be in the $25,000 to $30,000 price range.

Wow.

Now, underneath the dial and on some of the plates of the movement, a lot of times there are secret signatures.

It probably would be worth spending a little money and having an expert watchmaker disassemble the watch to see if there is anything underneath the dials.

Okay.

If there happens to be the "J.J." mark of Jules Jurgensen, that could double the price of the watch.

Okay.

MAN: This is a photograph that was given to my aunt right at the end of the Second World War by Margaret Bourke-White.

They met each other in Europe.

My aunt was working with the displaced persons at the end of the war.

In fact, my aunt was very senior in the administration, and many millions of people they had to relocate back to homes that were thousands of miles, I guess, from where they'd been forced to flee from.

So, what part of Europe did your aunt work in?

She talked about France and Germany.

I think most of the time she was in Germany.

Well, your aunt sounds like a remarkable woman, and Margaret Bourke-White was a remarkable woman as well.

She was a woman of many firsts.

She was the first woman photographer to be hired by Henry Luce for Fortune magazine.

Okay.

She was the first American photojournalist to go to Russia in 1930.

She was the first photographer to have a cover image on Life magazine in 1936, and during the Second World War she was the first woman combat photographer and actually was in Buchenwald in Germany, Okay.

liberating the prisoners in the concentration camps.

But if we go back and look at this picture, what you have is a picture of the George Washington Bridge during construction that she did as part of a photo essay for Fortune magazine, which was the first American magazine to really focus on the industrial landscape, the corporate landscape.

And what Margaret Bourke-White brought to her images was a very sophisticated sensibility that drew on a Modernist aesthetic, an artistic aesthetic, but also an appreciation for the machine, for the industrial age.

You have a vintage photograph, which of course is the preferred photograph.

It was done in 1933, and if we look at the edges of the photograph, we see that they have this black border.

This is characteristic of what Bourke-White elected in her exhibition prints.

The picture is, of course, mounted, and she has her penciled signature, which indicates it is a final print.

Oh, okay.

An exhibition print.

At auction, an estimate that I would place would be $20,000 to $30,000.

Wow.

It's probably one of Margaret Bourke-White's ten best photographs.

Really?

Thank you so much for bringing it in.

Wow, that's... that's amazing.

I wouldn't have had any idea that it was worth that.

When you walked in, the blood started coursing through my veins.

(chuckling): I saw that.

(laughing) WOMAN: This belonged to my late father-in-law.

I think he won it at a card game in a saloon in Chicago in probably the 1930s.

Well, we actually recognize the artist who made the bottle.

Mm-hmm.

And he was an itinerant artist that traveled around the Midwest, and the fact that your father was in Chicago in 1930 makes a lot of sense.

Mm-hmm.

And the maker of the bottle is a gentleman by the name of Carl Worner.

And he actually has a fairly extensive body of work.

Really?

There are Worner bottles that we know of in Chicago, St. Louis, Buffalo.

Uh-huh.

He traveled down into Pennsylvania.

We know bottles from New Jersey.

So he really traveled around and covered quite a bit of distance making these bottles.

Now, what we have is just carved and painted woods, and the condition of this one is extraordinary.

In part, the paint is so bright and cheery because the bottle is sealed.

On top of the marquee we can see "W.

Hunt."

That was assuredly the name of the saloon owner that Worner made this bottle for.

That helps us date it.

Mm-hmm.

It also helps date and track Worner's travels.

We're fairly sure he was born in Germany.

Mm-hmm.

Some of his early bottles were dating to about the 1890s.

Mm-hmm.

This bottle we're suspecting is probably about 1910.

He also did shoe shops, he did restaurants.

Bars were the most prolific, because there was a bar on every corner.

Oh, sure.

And those were the guys that he could walk in and get a drink and a meal from, and maybe clean up or sleep there and make a bottle.

Now, we have a painted scene down there.

And what is that about?

Well, I don't know for sure, but it reminds me of some German woodcarvings that I've seen of something I think is called "Die Freischütz," or "Der Freischütz."

So it's calling back to his German roots.

That's right.

And that's what folk artists do.

Now, you speak German and you can identify what this is saying on here.

It says "One of the Seven Schwaben."

I believe that refers to people from Swabia.

Okay.

In Germany.

So we have here six people.

Well, down here it says, "Where is the seventh one?"

And that's what we're going to find out.

And this is Worner's signature.

That's why we know this is a bottle by Worner, because he always hid the seventh guy.

(chuckling) This is a very, very beautiful one.

It's very large.

That has a lot to do with its value, and it's amongst a group of bottles that people really seek out and collect.

In today's market, the retail value is $3,000 to $4,000.

Wow.

(chuckling) That's pretty astonishing.

Who has the biggest collection of 20th-century American art in the U.S.?

Well, in a sense, we all do.

During the Great Depression, the United States government commissioned legions of artists to create tens of thousands of works of art, and now Uncle Sam needs your help in finding some of these lost treasures.

Inspector General of the U.S. General Services Administration, Brian Miller, gave us a brief history of the New Deal program.

In the early 1930s, almost 30% of Americans were out of work.

A number of jobs programs were established, where it would pay artists to do painting, sculptures and all sorts of art.

We call them New Deal art programs or W.P.A.

art programs.

They lasted through 1943, approximately.

The federal government owned the artwork, and the artwork was then displayed in various government buildings.

Tens of thousands of pieces of art were created.

We know where some are, we don't know where others are.

As a federal building was demolished or a federal agency moved out of a building, these pieces of art were mislaid.

During the '60s and '70s, the General Services Administration was charged with the responsibility of being a custodian of this art.

They started to catalog the art and keep track of it.

WALBERG: How does one know if they have a piece of New Deal art?

MILLER: Well, there are many labels and tags that are on the paintings and sculptures.

Some of them on the frame will actually have a tag that says "W.P.A.

art."

The recovery of a New Deal artwork begins when our office or the Inspector General's Office is notified that there is possibly a New Deal work of art for sale or there's a question of ownership.

And our office, the Fine Arts Program, does research and then we're able to make a definitive decision of whether or not it's federal property.

There's an example of a painting by a well-known artist that has been recovered by the G.S.A., Fourteenth Street at Sixth Avenue.

Tell me about that.

DEBRA FORCE: Fourteenth Street at Sixth Avenue was painted by John Sloan, who was one of the premier American artists in the early 20th century.

He was a member of a group called the Ashcan School, or The Eight, and this was a group of eight artists who all had a similar philosophy about what they wanted to paint, and that was life on the seams, or what the true nitty-gritty of the city and urban life was like.

The John Sloan painting came to our attention in 2002 when our office was contacted by a lawyer.

They described the painting, they gave us some images.

Through the documentation that we had and comparing it with the information that was given to us, we were able to confirm that it was federal property.

WALBERG: This work obviously is part of the W.P.A.

project, so therefore it will never come up for sale.

But if it were to ever be on the market, what do you think the value would be?

FORCE: It's a major New York street scene, which is the most desirable kind of subject for the artist.

The value of a painting like this, if one were to be found, would be in the range of $750,000.

ERICKSON: The G.S.A.

looks to find a museum or university gallery to place the work of art and acknowledge the person who has returned the artwork.

The Sloan painting is now on display for the public's enjoyment at the Detroit Institute of Art.

WALBERG: Is there a reward for returning artworks?

However they come into possession of a piece of W.P.A.

artwork, the title and ownership is still with the federal government.

There is no reward for returning New Deal artwork, W.P.A.

artwork.

We hope that people do this, one, out of the goodness of their heart; two, out of their sense of duty.

The biggest incentive is if they don't, there could be legal ramifications, which is why special agents from the Office of Inspector General get involved in this.

MILLER: There are a number of paintings that we're looking for.

We've added 130 paintings to the F.B.I.

database for lost and stolen art, and we are tracking these paintings down.

The American taxpayer paid for this art, and we are recovering American art for America.

MAN: It's a letter from Robert E. Lee to my great-great-great-grandfather, Charles Minnigerode, who was the rector of St. Paul's Church in Richmond during the war.

When he was in Richmond, was he Confederate?

Did he fight in the war, or he just... Oh, no, no, he was too old to fight.

He had actually been in Williamsburg originally.

He came from Germany.

He's actually credited with doing the first Christmas tree indoors in Williamsburg, and they celebrate that tradition.

Robert E. Lee was an Episcopalian, so they'd known each other for quite a while in Richmond.

What you have here is a letter of Robert E. Lee.

One of the nice things about the letter is it's fully in his hand.

It's done in 1864.

Obviously Lee must have communicated to your many-great-grandfather that they needed help, they needed money, but they also had a lot of wounded soldiers.

And this letter is thanking him for contributing money to help with amputees.

The Confederacy, by 1864, was starting to lose a lot of people, were in very bad shape, and obviously your relative was very nice to contribute.

My father took this down to the Museum of the Confederacy a few years ago to get it reframed and remounted.

In it, Lee mentions a check that he's sending along as a contribution, and the people at the museum were able to check records and find a record of the contribution.

They were impressed that Lee had actually made his own contribution too.

Many times, in the heat of battle, and they were definitely in the heat of battle at that time, a lot of the letters tend to be very, very formal.

They're to other commanders, other soldiers.

This isn't an uplifting subject, but it is a personal letter.

It does show the humanity of both of them.

It definitely is a beautiful signature of Lee right here.

The museum beautifully did it up for you.

Robert E. Lee letters are good.

Fully hand-written letters are better.

And then, you know, talking about something that, again, gets into the suffering, the hardships of war, the amputations that the men have to be made to feel better, and then knowing that he responded on it... Mm-hmm.

I would say a conservative retail-- in other words, if you were in a shop-- a conservative retail would be in the $3,000 to $5,000 range.

Oh, wow.

Well, don't tell my family because I think they will never see it again.

(laughter) Well...

I'll probably spirit it away.

WOMAN: I brought a book.

It appeared to me to be an herbal book.

I'm a gardener and I grow herbs, so I thought it was of interest to me and it was old.

And it was wet with little bugs in it.

And where did you get it?

At a garage sale in the suburbs of New York.

Probably 30 years ago.

Well, it's from a well-known New York library.

It's got a large bookplate, the Horticultural Society of New York, who have sold books over the years, and the book itself is by a very well-known English author, Nicholas Culpeper.

You see his name down there.

Yes.

And its title is Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, or The London Dispensatory.

It's a series of English recipes from early authors such as Galen, a classical author.

They used to have medical remedies based upon plant life.

So you'd have an index at the back.

You've got a table of diseases.

You've got a lot of recipes to do with the liver.

"Lice killeth," presumably killing lice.

Then "lice causeth," causing.

And then lots about itching.

It's very worn with age.

But this is an early calfskin binding.

It ran into lots and lots of editions.

And here it is, a sixth edition of the book.

Culpeper himself was born in 1616 and died in 1654.

And the work was very, very popular.

The book was published in America for the first time in Boston in 1720.

This particular edition is 1659.

London.

The first was 1653.

The binding itself, you see, is just the calf.

It's got the turn-ins.

It's before the ages of having what we call "paste-downs."

Okay.

And the whole thing is in absolutely unsophisticated condition.

What did you pay for this book?

25 cents.

25 cents?

And that was 30 years ago?

Yes.

The people that I bought it from said that their grandmother was a doctor and that this was her book and they were getting rid of all her junk that was in their basement.

Well, right now, I would put a retail value on this of between $2,000 and $3,000.

Oh, I think it was a good investment on 25 cents 30 years ago.

Yes, it certainly was a good investment.

WOMAN: I brought some human figures that have been in my family for about 20 years.

They were given to my father-in-law, who's a physician, by one of his patients kind of as a thank-you for all the years of service.

And then he has then passed them on to my husband and myself.

And my husband is also a physician.

They are what we like to refer to as doctors' figures, simply because they were anatomically correct, or as correct as possible.

They are from Goa, which is on the west coast of India when it was a Portuguese colony.

So they're what's called Indo-Portuguese from around about 1750.

And there's even some speculation, based upon the carving of the eyes and the hairline, that they may have actually been carved by a Chinese artisan who was based in Goa.

And what's very interesting about them, if I just slowly lift her arms up, she looks like a damsel in distress at this stage.

And we remove the body here.

You can see we have this stained ivory interior, which has, as far as they knew, all the most important parts.

And then what's even more interesting is that we have an unborn child as well.

Which is really quite unusual.

You also have here the figure lacking some of the more important pieces.

They are carved of ivory.

And what's really nice to see is the coloring, and the staining's still intact.

They're really in quite good condition Okay.

for their age.

One of the reasons that they're in such good condition is that they've been mounted onto these boards, which they were probably always mounted on.

We have this wonderful backing, which has got this traditional Indian, almost sort of cut card work and pierced backing.

And what's interesting about ivory is that you see it's taken on that yellow surface.

That's oxidization, but that's also the natural oils from your hand.

And these don't really have much yellowing because they're mounted on board.

So people don't really touch the actually figures.

And you don't have to keep them buried in a closet, just out of direct sunlight.

Okay.

They're really nicely carved.

There are two of them, but these figures were never made to be a pair.

However, I would suggest if they were to be sold at auction, to sell them as two.

And I would expect to see them to have an estimate, for the two, of about $8,000 to $12,000.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

This lithograph and this, as it turns out, drawing-- I thought it was a lithograph when I bought it-- I purchased at an auction house which was going out of business in Baltimore.

I'm thinking ten years ago, but it was a while ago.

Okay.

And they had brought all this stuff out of their attic and out of their basement and it was just piles of things everywhere.

And they were auctioning things off as fast as they could.

By the end of the day, they couldn't even keep up with what they had, so they started instead of selling off individual pieces, they were forming piles of stuff.

Wow.

And I bought a couple of piles of stuff.

And in one of the piles were these two.

And it wasn't until I got home that I was piling through and I thought that they looked interesting.

Because this is written in script, I was able to look the guy up and realized that he was a relatively well-known artist.

I was thrilled that I found him.

This little guy over here, I was at an auction house in Washington last year, and this was sitting in a frame in a corner somewhere and just because I happened to have owned this one, I knew what that was.

Yeah.

And so I was very excited and I ended up bidding on it and bought it for 50 bucks.

And you do a lot of collecting and buying...

I run around and buy stuff, mostly works on paper.

And I accumulate, much to my wife's chagrin... (both laughing) A lot of little things.

But I'm particularly proud of these.

As you know from the added inscriptions, these are by Zao Wou-Ki.

This would not have been written by the artist.

Somebody else was kind enough, probably the collector before you, to write that in.

Now, he was actually born in Beijing in 1921.

Ah.

And although he certainly comes out of the Chinese tradition, even as a young student of art, he was also very interested in the Western tradition.

So although he was learning calligraphy and traditional Chinese arts and Chinese styles, he was looking at Western art books and looking at what was going on in the late 19th and early 20th century.

So even as a young student, he was interested in Cezanne, Picasso, and he was thinking about those.

So, in 1948, he moves to Paris.

And this is his dream come true.

And he's working and studying there as well.

But he keeps that old influence.

He keeps that Chinese heritage.

So he starts with a representational style that's very calligraphic in terms of its line.

I mean, that's especially true of this ink drawing that you've got here.

But it's also true of the prints.

Now, you've got two prints, both of them are etchings.

And the easy tell for that is you've got this very obvious indentation.

You need a fair amount of pressure to make an etching and that's a plate mark.

You've got three works that are relatively early.

He's still representational.

But the end of the '50s, he's gone to pure abstraction.

So we know just by looking they've got to be from the late '40s or early 1950s.

For the prints, were we to check in the catalogue raisonné, we could come up with the exact dates.

The drawing is actually dated down here.

And it looks like '51.

The etchings are multiples.

They're not going to be as rare, but they're still very desirable.

You've got a figural piece, which is not something he's all that well known for, Okay.

so they're more unusual.

And it's really quite a sizable piece.

You've got primarily the black ink, but you've also got this red plate tone that brings out some extra oomph to it.

Okay, so that's not...

I thought they had some sort of deformation.

It's not, it's supposed to be there.

That's part of the print.

And then you've got this one that's more typical of his works with the landscape.

Both of these are quite striking.

Were you to sell these at auction today, you would be looking at about a thousand to $1, 500 for the smaller.

You'd be looking at $1,500 to $2,000 for the larger.

Wow, that's a lot.

Having said that, this is a one-of-a-kind work of art; it's a drawing.

Now, you said you got the lot for $100 for all these pieces?

No, no, $10 for the stack.

$10 for the whole stack of works by all different kinds of artists.

And the rest of them are probably worth about $10.

I think you came out okay.

If you were to sell this at auction today, this drawing would probably net you about $20,000 to $25,000.

No.

Yes.

Really?

You have a great collecting eye.

Really, seriously?

I'm not making that up.

It's wonderful.

Thank you so much for bringing it.

Thank you for telling me.

I'll need an armed guard to go home.

(laughs) BOY: My grandfather's a really big antique collector and he gave me this.

It's a Cesar Chelor plane from 1725.

And Cesar Chelor was the slave of Mr. Nicholson.

Well, Francis Nicholson was the first known American plane maker.

And Cesar Chelor worked for him as a slave.

But Francis Nicholson freed him upon his death.

So in 1753 is when Cesar Chelor became independent and started making planes with his own imprint.

He's the first African American to mark tools that he manufactured and one of the first African Americans to have an independent business in this country.

And if you read the stamp, it says, "Cesar Chelor, living in Wrentham."

That's Wrentham, Massachusetts.

It's one of the top examples I've ever seen of his work.

It's in wonderful condition.

And the form, it cuts what's called a bolection molding, which is a complex molding.

Collectors love that because it's an architectural molding.

A Cesar Chelor plane, it's just the single most desirable molding plane you could ever possibly come by.

I hope you appreciate what a wonderful gift your grandfather gave you.

Yeah.

The market is softer than it had been about five years ago, but I would say an auction estimate on this plane would be about $6,000 to $8,000.

It would have easily brought $12,000 about five or six years ago.

Do you think you'll be a tool collector one day?

Yeah, probably.

That's great.

WOMAN: This was my father's war log when he was a prisoner during World War II.

The Red Cross had come and distributed these wartime logs.

Well, when the Red Cross left, most of them were confiscated by the Germans.

My father, however, was able to hold onto his because he had a job where he cleaned the latrines.

And he built this shelter in the latrines and that's where he would keep it.

Incidentally, he had a nickname of "Stinky."

Stinky, okay.

And at night he would bring the wartime log up to his camp and he would put entries in there.

His buddies would write poems and draw pictures and tell stories.

So it's pretty much 18 months of my father's captivity.

So he was really able to hang onto it by putting it in a place that no one was going to search, right?

Exactly.

Really, the beginning of it starts with the POW form that was supplied by the Germans.

Right.

And POW, of course, prisoner of war, and they really were treated like prisoners.

And here we have a snapshot, or we might say mugshot, of your father with a number below his name, is how they would have serialed him and kept track of him while he was a prisoner.

It gives a little bit of other details-- date of birth and next of kin.

We also know he was flying in a B-17.

And then the Red Cross, through the YMCA, would have distributed these wartime logs to prisoners.

As much as this is a unique item, these were distributed.

Though some were confiscated, many did survive.

What's interesting about your father's log is it's very complete.

It starts with your father, he must have probably later put his dog tag on the front after the war as kind of an introduction to the whole thing.

Right, right.

Americans were issued with their own dog tags, but then, when they were captured, they were issued with the dog tags or ID tags from each stalag that they were kept in.

Again, we can see that there's a B-17 drawing that may have been drawn by either your father or perhaps one of his friends.

And it's going down.

We also see a great little cartoon rendering of your father kind of making fun of the fact that he was the tail gunner, and there the whole tail's kind of disintegrating on him.

So, here thinking happy to be alive and in a position to be able to make fun of what happened.

And then we have a group of telegrams that detail a little bit of the story.

And these were sent to your grandmother.

Yes.

Let's take a look at one that basically says, "Sgt.

Frank Urban has been mentioned in an enemy broadcast as a prisoner in Germany."

Did your grandmother or your father ever talk about this time period?

My father never spoke about the war much.

It was obviously a painful memory.

But looking through there, you could see how horrific it was.

The living conditions, the food, the varmints that walked around that they lived with in... it was hell of earth.

They had it rough.

And even though the Geneva Convention provided them certain standards, it was really a matter of what the Germans had to offer during war, because it was really wartime rations.

But what I think is great, there's a lot of telegrams to your grandmother, but then, at the very end here, we see a telegram, on his way home, saying, "Be home at 7:00 with Ray.

Have hot water ready.

Love, Frankie."

What a great end to the story, that he was able to make it back safe.

And all he wanted was a bath.

Yes, yes, yes.

Obviously, to your family, it's priceless.

Historically, to folks that collect militaria related to POWs, it's of interest because it is very complete.

At auction, this is somewhere in the $1,500 to $2,000 range as a memento of the service that he provided to the country.

Right, right.

MAN: Brought in a Tiffany mantel clock.

It was from my dad's stepmother's side of the family.

And we really don't know how long it was in her family.

It's just been passed down and passed down.

And where were they from?

Do you know that?

They were from New York.

It's on my mantel in my family room in the house.

We keep it wound up most of the time.

About once a week it will gain a couple minutes, but it keeps pretty good time.

This clock was retailed by Tiffany & Co. in New York City.

And they were a retailer of clocks, not a manufacturer of clocks.

And the clocks that they sold were primarily of very, very high quality.

This particular example has a movement that was manufactured in Boston by the Chelsea Clock Company.

Oh.

And their selling slogan is "Timekeepers of the Sea," but they also made some very high-grade mantel clock movements that they put in things like this.

As a mantel clock, with that type of movement, sold by Tiffany, it's a pretty important piece.

But what really makes this clock very, very special is the fact that it's in this glass case.

This case is engraved by a company by the name of Sinclair.

When he was very, very young, Sinclair moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Corning, which was a glassmaking center at the time.

Mm-hmm.

As a young boy, he became very talented in drawing natural objects like you see on this type of design.

He goes to work for the Hawkes Glass Company, and it's there that he really starts to learn the skill or the trade of glassmaking.

He becomes very interested in engraving glass.

And Sinclair went on to form his own company.

To find a clock in a glass case like this is very, very unusual.

Most of the ones that you find are in Steuben-made cases.

This particular one is signed on the back.

It has its little trademark.

It has this "S" in a wreath.

Oh, okay, I've never noticed that.

So without a doubt, we know that it's a Sinclair case.

And this would have been made in the early 20th century.

And that falls right into date with the Chelsea clock movement as well.

The few that have been found to date have been much, much smaller.

Value-wise, a clock like this in a high-retail shop somewhere in a metropolitan city, certainly would sell not so much to a clock collector but to a glass collector, without question, anywhere from $7,500 to $8,000 today.

Oh, okay.

Even in this economy.

Well, that's very good.

The family believes it was bought in 1828.

That's when great-great-grandparents were married in Lancaster.

That's where it was purchased.

And it's been in the family ever since.

Luckily, I have nine-foot ceilings, so it's in our living room.

I think that's one of the reasons why I inherited it.

Probably gets a little tight to the nine foot, doesn't it?

I think there's like an inch to spare.

It's a little tricky getting it into the house.

(both laugh) In the old house in Hagerstown, which had 12-foot ceilings, there was a picture of a pediment on top about a foot tall.

So that got lost through the years?

Somewhere through the years, yes.

The great thing about this, and maybe the thing that limits it somewhat, is the fact that it is so tall.

But the fact that it is so tall gives it a lot of presence.

It has wonderful architectural detail.

The keystone at the top is a nice touch.

And I like the arch in the doors, and I especially like that molding that mirrors that.

The other thing that makes this interesting from a visual point of view is the fact that it has curly maple.

I thought it was called tiger maple.

Is that something different?

Well, either one.

Oh, okay.

When this was made new, that curly maple would have been like on fire.

And you would have been able to see down in there and see all those little squiggles where that cross grain is.

Yeah.

And it would have really brightened up the room.

Oh, fantastic.

But after 170 years, that gets a patina on it.

I think this has probably had some type of a refinish or it was rubbed down.

The varnish over time will get a craquelure to it.

Normally, you would see more of the craquelure.

Now, part of the curly maple is a veneer.

Really?

Where?

You see right here on this door?

Yeah.

The very front of this is a little line of maple, but more importantly, what does the door look like from your side?

Very plain.

You see any curl in it?

Nothing, no.

It's all cherry secondary with a curly maple front.

However, in some areas, you do have solid curly maple.

Because look in the... you see?

You're right, you see it there.

And the back of that drawer.

This also has yellow pine secondary.

Oh, good grief, a little bit of everything.

Which makes me think that it's probably closer to Hagerstown than it is Pennsylvania.

Oh, okay.

It's a misconception that everything that has yellow pine secondaries is Southern.

And I don't disagree at all with the 1830 to '40 date on that.

Okay, excellent.

Are these original?

I doubt it, but it's the right time period for a Sandwich pull.

So, value.

What do you think?

Well, only value we knew, my grandmother actually paid $700 to her sister, and that was in the '60s.

Because my great-aunt Elsie needed coal for the winter, and that was the exchange.

Well, today, for a retail or an insurance value, I would put $9,500 on this.

Whew, okay.

You can live with that?

I can.

WOMAN: This sculpture came to my husband from his mother.

And his mother's father had been given it as a gift by a patient of his.

He was a physician in Philadelphia.

Well, it's a great sculpture.

It's by an American artist.

It's signed by Charles Schreyvogel.

And it says "copyright 1903."

So it's cast any time after 1903.

He died in 1912, so it's definitely a lifetime cast.

Okay.

And it has a foundry mark of the Roman Bronze Works in New York.

Roman Bronze was one of the leading foundries in America at this time.

Charles Schreyvogel was contemporary with Frederic Remington.

And Remington was the famous sculptor of cowboys and Indians.

And he sort of overshadowed Schreyvogel, who painted similar Western scenes.

What's wonderful about this is it actually has a title.

It's called The Last Drop.

This is a cavalry man and he's feeding his horse water.

It's a wonderful, intimate kind of scene and it reflects how dependent the soldier was on his horse.

Schreyvogel's studio was in Hoboken, New Jersey.

He traveled out west to Colorado in 1893 and he actually observed cavalrymen, cowboys and Indians, and that's reflected in his work.

But he actually went back to Hoboken to model these.

He also was friendly with people who were in the Buffalo Bill shows.

So he had experience from that.

We have all the wonderful details of the saddle and the bridle.

Here's the saddle bag, the roll.

You have the stirrup here.

What's also interesting is that there's a number underneath.

Did you ever see this under...?

No, no.

Right over here is a number, 79.

These were cast as people wanted them.

And I looked through some of the auction records and I saw numbers going up to about 115, 120.

Now, the actual original archives of the Roman Bronze Works are at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

And you might be able to contact them and somebody might be able to find out exactly when this was cast.

Quite a number of these have shown up at auction in the last few years, and in May of 2010, one of these at auction brought $62,500.

My goodness.

A couple of years ago, one brought $96,000.

Oh, my.

So I would put an auction estimate of between $60,000 and $90,000.

That's amazing.

Beyond my expectations.

My mother-in-law would be very happy.

You're watching Antiques Ro adshow from Washington, D.C. WALBERG: And now, it's time for the Roadshow Feedback Booth.

I have this little cute antique toy sewing machine that was given to me by a shepherd in Germany, not a German shepherd.

And it was given to me 50 years ago and it's worth up to $600.

I'm so excited, it's a quite pricey doorstop in my house.

I thought my "vayses" were worthless.

I found out my "vahses" are worth $500.

Fantastic.

And I found out that I can take my Salvador Dali original down from its place of honor because it's a fake.

And I never liked it anyway.

We went to the library and paid 50 cents for these two books, a 200-year-old sermon book... And a 70-year-old math textbook.

But apparently no one wants to collect math textbooks, so this is worth a dollar.

But somebody likes to collect 200-year-old sermon books.

This is about $50.

I brought my violin that was in my husband's family.

And I always teased him that I married him for his violin, so I wanted to find out if it was worth it.

Today's our 34th wedding anniversary.

And the violin wasn't worth as much, but he certainly is.

I brought a lamb's head cookie jar, and it actually won today.

It's worth between $100 and $300.

Yes, it did.

And I brought antique silver bowls and dishes that my sister Connie, by the way, was using for ashtrays.

Thank you, Connie.

And they turned out to be of little value, but still we had a good time here and I'm sure she'll be glad to know her ashtrays made it to the An tiques Roadshow.

I'm Mark Walberg, thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time on Antiques Roadshow.

That's beautiful.

Picasso, huh?

What do you know about it?

I don't know anything.

Well, it says Picasso; let's hope that's right.