Austin, Hour 3 (2015)

Antiques Roadshow is chomping at the bit to show off the treasures we found in Austin, Texas.

Whenever I was a kid I liked to imagine these were bullet holes.

I think the moths have done more damage to your flag than the Yankees ever had a chance to do.

My daughter loves it, and I'm not sure that going clubbing with that ring is something that I'd prefer her to do.

(chuckling): No!

Really?

There's so much more to see from Austin, right now.

Welcome to Antiques Roadshow.

Hi, I'm Mark Walberg, this week in Austin, Texas.

This is Roadshow's second visit to Austin, and our tenth trip to Texas.

We always discover big treasures in this big state, like this one.

Check it out.

WOMAN: This painting is by an artist, Loren Mozley.

And it's supposed to be aspen trees, is what it says.

To me it doesn't look like aspen trees, but that's okay.

I don't know where he's from, but I know he started the UT School of Arts with another artist.

APPRAISER: Right.

Way back sometime.

And where did you get the painting?

It was my mother's and she loved the painting.

I was always scared of it.

It's just... it's a scary-looking forest.

I've grown to love it now that it hangs in my house.

Oh, good.

Well, the artist, as you said, is Loren Mozley.

The medium is oil on canvas board.

And this painting is of aspens.

It's titled on the back.

Loren Mozley was born in Illinois in 1905 and then moved to New Mexico in 1906.

And he became known as a Southwest artist.

He spent time in Paris studying, went to New York, was heavily influenced by artists Andrew Dasburg and John Marin.

Also Georgia O'Keeffe was another influence.

In 1938, Loren Mozley became one of the founders of the University of Texas fine art department.

And there was some controversy because he and his partner wanted to use live models as nudes.

So there was a lot of hoopla surrounding that.

Whoo, yeah.

This painting was done in 1947.

It was exhibited at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Exhibition of Western artists in 1948.

And it's just a classic example of this Modernist style with the cubism... A painting like this, with the great provenance and the exhibition history, I would imagine to sell at auction anywhere between $30,000 and $50,000.

(laughs) No!

Really?

Yes.

Oh, my goodness.

Everybody says that.

G... wow.

It's really one of the nicest things I've seen doing Antiques Roadshow.

Really?

Oh, that makes me feel really good.

This jersey, from my understanding, belonged to Virgil Johnson, who is my husband's grandfather.

And he played for the Chicago Black Hawks in 1937, '38.

And that year was the first year that they played for the Stanley Cup.

And the story is, is that this was the jersey that he wore during those game series and that they had actually won the Stanley Cup that year.

You're partially right.

Okay.

In 1938, the Black Hawks played for their second championship.

Okay.

And they won.

Mr. Johnson played 25 games for them during the regular season, played ten games in the playoffs, and ultimately, as we know, helped them win their second championship.

The emblem is the third in the Blackhawks' history.

It's a wool jersey from the 1938 season.

And this jersey hails from the time when "Black Hawks" was two words.

Now it's "Blackhawks," all one word.

We're used to seeing baseball jerseys from this era.

I've never seen a hockey jersey from this era.

What we notice are some condition impediments.

We have some moth holes and some toning.

I will ascribe the toning to both usage and the passage of time.

Mm-hmm.

It's a Spalding jersey.

It's a nice piece.

What we have is ultimately a museum-quality jersey.

I think what you would expect at auction is a value of $7,000 to $10,000.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

(chuckling): That's exciting.

MAN: My distant cousin sewed this.

Her name was Mary Hodges.

That's a picture of her right there.

She sewed this for my great-great-grandfather to carry in the Civil War in 1861.

So was he from Texas?

He was from Texas.

I know the unit that he was in was Colonel McCulloch's unit.

A lot of those Texas organizations served for a short amount of time doing duty in Texas and then their enlistments would expire.

And then if they wanted to re-enlist, if they wanted to continue on in Confederate service, they would end up in different organizations that left Texas and went east to the army in Tennessee and elsewhere.

It's a rare opportunity to actually know who used it and who actually made the item.

My grandmother was smart enough to just document a ton of information on it.

We've got letters that my great-great-grandfather wrote to and from Mary Hodges, and it's just fascinating reading about it.

When we find a flag like this, of course, out in the world, what we want it to be is a battle flag, something that was carried into combat at the head of a regiment of infantry or a squadron of cavalry or something like that.

That's what I like to imagine.

Whenever I was a kid I liked to imagine these were bullet holes, but I never had any idea really.

Yeah, I think the moths have done more damage to your flag than the Yankees ever had a chance to do.

I believe that.

A flag like this in this size and with the construction style that it is, most likely was sent to your relative to be his own personal thing to carry.

Okay.

And not necessarily something to be used as a battle flag.

That makes perfect sense.

It just simply wouldn't survive otherwise.

But as an original flag, and if you ever do find one out in the world and you're looking, the features of this that stand out immediately are it's completely hand sewn, it's double-sided so that it could actually wave instead of just be hung someplace.

If you count them up, you've got 11 stars there.

What it tells us is that it would have most likely been sewn after June of 1861, when Tennessee came in.

Tennessee was the last state to secede.

Sometimes you'll find a first national flag that will have other stars on it in anticipation of the secession of some of the border states like Kentucky and Missouri, but those states never officially seceded and joined the Confederacy.

That's fascinating.

Have you ever had the flag appraised?

We had a collector once offer my grandmother $7,000 for it.

That was 30 years ago.

Well, the Civil War market has had some ups and downs since then.

In 2014, retail market value for this would be between $10,000 and $15,000.

That's beautiful.

That's awesome, man.

Great to hear.

WOMAN: I brought some photographs from my husband's grandfather's time during World War II.

APPRAISER: I was able to look him up a little bit, through papers you had brought that are in the scrapbook as well as a history online.

His name was Major Harry V. Anderson.

He enlisted in the Army in 1944 and he had gone into the 101st Airborne Division.

From there he had kind of immediately just got into the battlefield.

He was at the Battle of Bastogne, and at Christmastime, his platoon was bombed when they were in the chow line, and it was pretty much decimated.

Did your husband's family tell you more about what he had done before the war?

Not much.

My husband was very young when he passed.

Sure.

What we do know about him was he moved to New York early in life and founded the Interior Design magazine.

Oh, I see.

So he had a background in the arts.

Yes, yes.

Okay, well, after the Battle of Bastogne, I mean, it was a real tragic incident, and he describes in one letter I read how he had been sleeping in bunkers in the area.

At that point, the 101st were asked to go up to Berchtesgaden, which was Hitler's lair, to see what kind of artifacts were around.

South of Berchtesgaden they uncovered subterranean caverns that stored Hermann Goering's looted art.

This was "his private collection of art."

In the collection are some of the world's greatest masterpieces.

It's astounding and mindboggling what he had spirited away to these caverns.

Over here, for instance, we have a portrait by Rembrandt, we have a van Dyck masterpiece.

There is a Vermeer, but it's not really a Vermeer.

After the war it turned out it had been a forgery, so they got Goering on that one.

He didn't know everything.

And then over in here we have a beautiful, a major Rubens.

This is a portrait of your grandfather-in-law, and you see that he's holding a German carving...

Right.

...of Mary Magdalene.

And have you seen that piece?

We did.

In recent years?

We did.

On our honeymoon we were in Paris and we were in the Louvre.

It's in the Louvre.

And you brought a scrapbook, and in the scrapbook are probably 60 other pieces.

Right.

And on the back is a title and an origin of each of the pieces.

Thank God for our American heroes who were over there and not only did they go to battle and they fought to save our country and the world, but they did this.

They fought to save the art.

In my career I've never found a grouping about, you know, the current name for them are Monuments Men.

Yeah.

I'd put a value on the grouping that we see here before us, at auction, of $2,000 to $3,000.

Wow.

WOMAN: I live in New Orleans and I go to thrift stores pretty frequently, and I saw this behind the counter and thought, "Oh, it's pretty."

(chuckles) So, bought it.

APPRAISER: And tell me about how much you had to pay for it.

$80.

I love the fact that it's a thistle decorated with thistles.

It's beautifully colored.

You couldn't make this without a very high quality kiln, what we call a majolica glaze kiln.

And these majolica glaze kilns were active throughout Europe and England from certainly from the 1880s and into the early 20th century.

This one was made in Austria probably about 1890 or 1900.

Now, it's got some damage.

There's a little piece here missing, although you have that piece.

You have that thistle flower.

And you can see a few more little bits where leaves are missing.

Have you thought about having it fixed?

Yes, that's what I was wondering, if it would be worth investing in having it restored.

First of all, you have very little investment in it, and there's no question that the value will increase if you restore it beyond the cost of restoration.

It's probably going to be $400 or $500.

If it was fixed, in a good antique shop, a jardiniere and pedestal like this, the price would have to be at least $3,500.

I think even as is, most antiques dealers would price it at around $2,000.

Wow.

Yeah.

WOMAN: A few weeks ago, I was looking for art here in Austin to hang into a house I had bought.

And up until then, I had a lot of French country, but I bought a very modern house, so I wanted something to hang on the fireplace, and I saw this in a resale shop, and I noticed it had these grays and these really pretty colors, and it was ten dollars, and it had this stainless steel frame, and so I went ahead and purchased it.

Good for you.

I notice you have that on here, right here, actually the ten dollar price tag.

So do you know anything about who the artist is or what the medium is?

I do not.

It was signed.

I couldn't read it.

It says Romare Bearden, and it is also numbered 30 out of 125.

Romare Bearden is a 20th century artist who died in the 1980s, but is one of the most celebrated African-American artists.

He's well-known mostly for his collages that he did.

This is an example of a slightly different look of his, but it was another theme that he was very famous for, which is jazz clubs and music.

This one is from his jazz series, and there were six images in this series.

Bearden was really well known for being a huge supporter of African-American artists, writers, dancers.

He founded several organizations that were meant entirely for the support of young black artists and helping them come along.

He was the director of the Harlem Cultural Arts Council.

He wrote and published several books and was known to be friends with Langston Hughes, various jazz musicians, all different kinds of major figures in African-American art.

And for that reason, he's celebrated hugely as having a major impact on later 20th century African- American art coming to the fore.

This particular print is a lithograph, which is an image in which the artist works directly on the stone and drew this composition.

There are many others done of it, of course.

There's 125 altogether.

This particular print was made in 1979, towards the end of his career.

Do you have any idea of the value of the print beyond the ten dollars that you spent?

No.

I figured it was worth more than ten dollars, but $100, $200?

I think you could add another zero to that number and the current auction estimate that I would place on a work like this would be $1,000 to $2,000.

And I'm very pleased you brought it in.

It's wonderful to see, especially in a city like Austin to have an image celebrating music and I'm thrilled you brought it in.

You okay?

Yeah, I'm okay.

I am.

I mean... that's exciting.

I don't have anything that's... you know, that's nice.

It's like... sorry.

It's like...

I told you I wasn't going to cry.

Oh, my gosh.

MAN: This is a 1934 Wurlitzer jukebox.

In 1976, my wife went to an auction in Meade, Kansas, and it was one of these buildings where, as they changed businesses, everything got moved to the back and this was in the back of it.

And so they decided to clean it out and it went up for auction.

She paid $75 for it.

She gave it to me for my Father's Day present.

Wow, pretty nice gift.

So it is a Wurlitzer model P10, manufactured in 1934, and it plays 78.

It's made in a walnut case in an Art Deco style and it's coin-operated.

When we take a look at the back here, we can see that there's a metal tag that gives us a lot of information regarding this machine-- the serial number, and there was what, about 4,000 of these, I think, produced.

Somewhere between 4,000, 4,500, somewhere in there.

Yeah.

And the complexity of this machine is really amazing, isn't it?

It is.

When we take the back door off, we can take a glimpse at this and just see how truly complex this really is.

And amazing condition.

When your wife acquired this, it was probably from the original location in which it sat, wouldn't you think?

It was, yes.

I think one of the things that's always interesting to me not only about an object, but how does an object fit into context in American history?

And when we think a 1934 jukebox, we think a year after Prohibition, the Depression.

It's really an escape.

Music was a gift that enabled people to forget their troubles.

Yes, it was.

I think you've got an exceptional condition model.

At auction we would estimate it at $1,200 to $1,800.

Okay.

Very good.

Shall we play it for everybody?

Sure.

All right.

(band music playing) WOMAN: It was given to us by my partner's mother, who got it from her mother.

Their family is from South Carolina.

They have a family farm somewhere around Laurens, South Carolina.

We got the piece about 15 years ago.

Probably five years ago, I was looking at a brochure that the Museum of Fine Arts at Houston put out, and we saw a picture of a pot that looked very similar.

So I began to wonder whether this was the same maker.

The brochure talked about a man by the name of Dave Drake from California, a former slave.

You thought it might be a piece of Dave Drake pottery.

Dave Drake was an enslaved African American who was working in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, making pottery for about 30 years, and really even after the Civil War.

You're close.

Mm-hmm.

It's not Dave Drake's work, but it is from the Edgefield District of South Carolina, where there are a number of important potteries.

This piece was probably made by one of the most famous Edgefield potters, a guy named Thomas Chandler.

Chandler was trained in Baltimore and moved to Edgefield in the 1830s and was active working for various potters until about 1850, when he branched out on his own.

He ran his own pottery for a few years and died in 1854.

Much of Chandler's stoneware is actually stamped "Thomas Chandler," and there is no stamping on this piece.

So it may have been made when Chandler was working for another pottery, before he branched out on his own.

My partner says that her mother says they used to churn butter in it.

Is that what these kind of things would be used for?

I don't think it was a butter churn, but it's a storage jar and it could have been used to store many things in.

It probably wasn't used to store liquid in, because if it were a liquid storage jar, you wouldn't expect to see this big opening at the top.

You'd want something that would not lead to the evaporation of the contents.

It's a great example of Edgefield pottery.

It has this distinctive sort of runny, drippy glaze called alkaline glaze.

It has this underglaze decoration here, which was done with a slip cup-- in other words, a little cup was used to drip the glaze on here.

The thing that's really remarkable about it is its monumental size.

This is a big... Yeah.

piece of Chandler pottery.

Back here you can see all the great characteristics of Southern alkaline-glazed pottery, where the glaze is really dripping down.

It does have some condition issues.

You can see a fairly big crow's foot here.

There is a hairline across here.

Mm-hmm.

By the way, all this discoloration, that's from the firing process.

It really has nothing to do with any damage to it.

And this bulge as well?

The bulge you see there is not from the firing process.

It's from when it was being made.

You have a lot of weight that's resting on this relatively small base, and so it bulged a little bit.

But overall, this is a fantastic example of Chandler pottery.

And all of these condition issues, to a stoneware collector, these are sort of the normal things that happen in the life of a great piece of pottery.

For something that was probably made sometime in the 1840s, it's in pretty doggone good shape.

Aside from the swirls that you talked about, what are the classic Chandler...?

It's the decoration and the form.

And the form.

If you were to go into a good shop in South Carolina or anywhere in the South that dealt in stoneware, I would think a retail price for this piece would be somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000.

Wow.

Mm-hmm, wow, that's great.

Yeah, I had no idea that it would be that much.

WALBERG: The introduction of the horse to North America by the Spanish in the 16th century led to a robust and accomplished equestrian culture.

By the 1700s, saddles in Mexico changed to include a horn, used to work a rope for catching cattle.

Isn't that right, Julius?

(clicks tongue) Come on, boy.

In Austin, appraiser Bruce Shackelford joined me to check out a fantastic private collection that included several beautiful handmade Mexican saddles.

Bruce, these saddles are elaborate art pieces.

But the saddle itself, it was a very important tool to the rider.

Maybe you can tell me a little bit about the function.

Well, the saddle as we know it today, the stock saddle for working livestock, evolved in Mexico after the conquest in the 1500s.

And these are stock saddles from Mexico.

They're not just for your average rider.

Who would be the kind of person that would get a saddle like this?

These people were powerful, and they wanted to show how important they were as caballeros by the way they rode.

This saddle was made in the 1880s.

It was shown in New Orleans in 1885 at a world exposition.

It is said to have been shown in Paris in the late 1880s and it's a masterpiece.

This decoration is embroidered sterling silver.

Oh, my.

All the decoration on the horn, on the tree is repoussé sterling silver.

The tan color embroidery is cactus fiber.

It's maguey cactus that grows in Mexico, and it's really hard, stiff material.

And to embroider like that, that saddle I'm sure took well over a year to create.

The stirrups, those are called tapaderos, and they're to protect the rider's feet and to keep the stirrups from hanging up in brush.

So the seat is made out of wood, and you call the actual saddle seat a saddle tree?

Yeah, it's a saddle tree, and it's the structure that fits on the horse and holds the rest of the saddle together.

That label is the label of the tree maker.

The tree is called a fuste.

Now, sometimes the tree makers put the saddles together, but sometimes they went to a number of craftsmen and then were put together.

And the value of this saddle today?

I would think if it came on the market in an auction, it would easily bring $30,000, probably more.

A saddle like this is scarce, especially with history.

Beautiful saddle.

We have another one to look at here.

Tell me about this one-- what year is it from?

This one was probably made in the late 1800s, but it reflects a tradition that was centuries old, goes back to the armored horses from the medieval period.

This is called an anquera, but in the medieval era, in the early Renaissance, these were made out of iron and covered the back of the horse for protection.

In this age, they were originally protecting the horse's rump from brush and from thorns working cattle, but then they became parade pieces, just beautiful decorated pieces.

All of this is embroidered with cactus fiber that's colored, and behind the rose embroidery, everything's fully tooled.

This was made as a set.

The sword, the bridle, the bit was made as a set, all of the silver.

Everybody saw the other person's work and put it together.

We know who owned this saddle, and it was ridden by an officer of Poncho Villa during the revolutionary period of 1910 to 1920.

If this saddle came up at an auction, because of the history, I think it would easily bring $40,000 to $45,000, possibly more.

Thanks so much, Bruce.

Sure.

It's really great we could come look at these masterpieces.

They're just fabulous.

MAN: My parents, my grandparents, and probably generations beyond them, all came from St. Louis, and after my grandparents died, '94, we went up to clean out their house.

Mm-hmm.

My grandfather was an attorney and a fairly eclectic collector of things.

He had a big library of books.

He was also a big St. Louis history buff, and so...

So this caught your eye.

It caught my eye.

Not only that, I mean, just the story that it told but also the lithographs that were just pretty amazing.

The book is called Pictorial St. Louis.

And it's a perspective map or a bird's-eye map in atlas form of the entire city of St. Louis.

Perspective maps have always been made from the 16th century on.

Right.

Mostly in Europe, but they'd be fairly small, and they wouldn't be particularly accurate.

This particular production was undertaken by Richard Compton, who was a lithographer and a printer in St. Louis, and he really wanted to recreate the city in lithographic form as an exact replica.

So he hired Camille Dry, who was an artist in St. Louis, to do these lithographs and produce the book.

It's a fascinating story about how they did it, when you think about it, because they didn't have bird's-eye views of the city.

Exactly.

They sent Mr. Dry up in a hot air balloon... Really?

...over the Mississippi to do initial sketches of each of the lithographs.

I had no idea.

And then they would go down and replicate every building, every window, every tree and haystack that they could recognize in the city.

What if we have a look at some of these plates?

Here's an example of downtown, and you can see, all the streets are illustrated.

They have carriages and so forth, trees, churches...

I think if we look at the first plate here... You've got waterfront, and where the Gateway Arch would be today...

Right.

Of course, but that was not there.

Do you recognize any of the areas in town here?

You know, the waterfront has changed so much since this day.

The Eads Bridge is still there.

Right.

Let me show you a couple other of these plates, because they're fascinating.

Over here, we can see, he went ahead and got these subscribers to pay for the book, and right down here is the original Anheuser-Busch factory.

Really?

So obviously they were drinking beer back then.

And another great pastime, of course, in St. Louis, was baseball.

Right.

And baseball was certainly beginning to take hold.

We find inside on another plate up here a wonderful replication of a baseball field with a game in progress.

I've never seen it.

And there are additional plates inside of what would be Sportsman's Park, that became the St. Louis Cardinals...

Right.

So it's an incredible tour de force.

It has some damage, a few issues with condition.

Right.

Plates have been silked, which is a special film they put on some of them.

But nevertheless, it's a really incredible thing and is highly recognized as one of the most important atlases of cities in America in the 19th century.

Really?

It was meant to illustrate the power of the city, in many respects.

If you were to take these plates out of the book, which we wouldn't want to do...

Right.

And to lay them in the order in which they were supposed to represent, the map would be 24 feet wide and eight feet high.

And because of the cost of producing it-- each one of these is a lithographic plate-- the volume originally sold in 1875 for $25.

So that was quite a lot of money at the time, even for a merchant in St. Louis.

Yeah.

This particular volume, even with the condition issues I've stated, would have an auction value of $7,000 to $9,000.

Wow.

Pretty amazing.

WOMAN: This is a letter written to my great-grandfather, and he was the childhood friend and grew up with Sam Clemens, the author that's known as Mark Twain.

Mark Twain, exactly.

So they corresponded, and this is one of the letters.

He's writing from Hawaii, May 7, 1866.

Right.

He was a correspondent for the Sacramento Union.

I think he stayed about four months in Hawaii, which a lot of people don't know, but it was the Sandwich Islands he referred to.

The Sandwich Islands.

And the content of the letter is fabulous.

He's talking about his experiences there, his travels there.

He was writing about the topical events and things that were going on.

He talks about a volcano.

He also gives some anecdotal stuff about a greased pig and a crazy comic scene in there, which I think is picked up later in some of his works.

This stuff became really kind of part of the fabric of what he was drawing on later on in life in his books.

They were childhood friends, right?

They go back.

Yes, they grew up in Hannibal together, yes.

And they even were steamboat pilots together.

Yes, they were.

He was a lifelong friend, I mean, so much so that you brought along here an exhibition that was held here in Austin in 1941 at the University of Texas dealing with their friendship and the letters between the two of them, and it's called "My First & Oldest & Dearest Friend."

So when we think about association value in a letter, the more meaningful the association, generally the more valuable the letter.

This is a great one.

It's early, it's 1866.

He was 31 at the time, hadn't really begun his writing career.

He was a journalist, but he wasn't really writing any of his novels.

And it was interesting looking into your great-grandfather.

Will Bowen, he's thought to be the model, or one of the models, for Tom Sawyer.

He is.

So he was a bit of a rascal, I guess, right?

Yeah, there's accounts of them all running kind of crazy in the neighborhood.

It's a fantastic letter.

The content I said is great, it's four pages.

The reason I didn't take them out of the housing you have them in is because of the fragile nature of the paper, and I just didn't want anything to happen to them until you get them conserved, which I'm going to recommend strongly that you do.

Okay.

How did you come to get the letter, by the way?

You found the letter?

I found the letter in my parents' house.

Unfortunately, it was after my father had passed away and some of his friends had come to, you know, do the big toast and what have you, and somebody needed a coaster out of the drawer, and there it was in the drawer.

As to the value, Twain letters range greatly, and it has to do with the content and who they're to.

This is something nice because it goes back to his childhood and it hooks in with his whole background in Hannibal and steamboats, so I would go on the stronger side on this and I would put an auction estimate of $8,000 to $12,000.

Wow, okay.

I hope you like that.

Yeah!

For insurance value, which I'm sure you're going to keep this, you'd want to be about $15,000, something like that.

Usually about double the low estimate on that.

Yeah.

MAN: It's a crystal chandelier that I inherited from my mother, who inherited it from my aunt, who was married to a congressman.

And it was reported to me by my mother that this was installed in the first Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., that was converted into a residence.

They took a bunch of the stuff out and they took and auctioned it.

Well, your mother and your aunt had really good taste.

It's made in France, probably in the 1800s, I would say the latter part of the 1800s.

And it was made by one of the major manufacturers in France, like Baccarat.

It's not signed, so I can't say for sure who made it, but the style and quality of this example is typically French.

What I like about this chandelier is the exquisite prisms and how wonderful it reflects the light.

Chandeliers at this point, with 18 lights, was made for a salon, a dining room or something very special, so an embassy would fit.

It is electrified.

That's actually going to make it a little bit easier to sell in today's market.

Yay, yay.

Yay!

So your aunt purchased this at auction.

Yes.

Do you have any idea how much she paid for it?

No.

After she passed away, they said it was worth about $5,000.

At auction, similar chandeliers have sold for $8,000 to $12,000.

Nice.

WOMAN: I bought it at a garage sale.

APPRAISER: Really?

Yes.

How much?

Two dollars.

You really sprung for it, huh?

You go to a lot of garage sales, you just bought it because you liked it, you collect things?

I collect things and I liked it the minute I saw him, and taking it out of the box for the garage sale, I said, "I'll take that."

And I asked him how much it was, and he said, "Well, since it's got a little break in it, I'll let you have it for two dollars."

Well, it's by a very famous woman artist, an American artist named Malvina Hoffman.

Oh.

She worked primarily in New York.

She was born in 1885.

She studied in New York at the Art Students' League, and she actually studied in Paris with the famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

She's most famous for a series of about 100 sculptures that she did for the Field Museum in Chicago, where she went around the world and she sculpted various natives in life-size, and they're at the Field Museum.

What's interesting about this piece is it's very early.

It's actually dated 1915.

Wow.

And it was made as a fountain.

Uh-huh.

There's a little spigot over here that the water drips down.

And there's actually a life-sized version of this in Cedar Rapids in the museum there.

And they made a few versions in the life-size, and then this was made as sort of a house/apartment size.

It's very clearly signed, "Malvina Hoffman."

And it also has a mark of the foundry, which is the Roman Bronze Works, which is in New York City, and they were among the leading foundries in this country at the time.

Wow.

It's wonderful, this interplay of these two figures, it's called "Boy with a Panther Cub," and he's some kind of a little god.

Up here, he has two little horns.

Maybe a follower of Bacchus or something like that.

He's holding grapes, which is a symbol of Bacchus, the god of wine.

What are the heads on the base?

Are they lions' heads, or...?

That's a good question, but they do look like lion heads, and these are called lion paw feet.

Okay.

It was made as a fountain, and it was outdoors.

Your piece was outdoors at some time, and what probably happened is it developed this very, very heavy patina.

Somewhere along the way, the patina got stripped off.

Somebody must have cleaned it down to the bare bronze, but since it was outside, you get a lot of pitting on the surface, so the condition is really not that good.

Also, the arm up here is cracked.

In this condition, it's actually still worth about $2,000 or $3,000 in a retail setting.

Wow.

You could put a new patina on it, and there are professional restorers and conservators who do that work, but it still always will be restored.

I would think to do a proper job restoring it would be at least $1,000, and if you restored it, it would probably be worth in the $5,000 or $6,000 range.

Goodness!

Now, if it was in real and perfect condition, it would probably be in a retail situation between $15,000 and $20,000.

Oh, well.

(laughing) I probably wouldn't have got it for two dollars either.

Well, maybe with three, it would have been three or four dollars!

MAN: They were my grandmother's, and she passed away about three years ago, and I inherited them.

And the family story was that my great-great-grandfather has been at the Battle of Wounded Knee, and he picked them up there.

Wounded Knee is in 1890 on Sioux land.

These are not Sioux, and they're actually not from that area.

The doll is Apache, from Arizona.

It's relatively early, about 1880, 1890.

The hide is made of tanned deer hide.

The beads are from Europe, probably Venice, and they would be traded to the Natives.

The tin cones would be repurposed from tin cans.

It has a very minimal face, which is typical of Apache dolls.

Oh, I was thinking it was missing something.

No, it's just very minimal.

And always that bow tie on top, it's an Apache characteristic.

The moccasins are from a completely different area.

They're Delaware Indian-- Delaware from Oklahoma.

And they're quite early-- they're earlier than the doll.

These date to about 1850.

The materials, again, have glass beads from Europe, probably Venice.

They're tiny seed beads.

And then the cloth is silk, also a trade item.

You have a floral design here, a leaf pattern, but the beads follow the contour of the leaf, so it's called contour beading.

This woman knew her way around a glass bead.

It's really exceptional beadwork.

The Apache doll on a retail basis I believe would sell for about $5,500.

For the Delaware moccasins, they're a bit earlier.

I think on a retail basis, these would sell for about $6,500.

Wow, okay.

I bought them in the south of France in the 1980s.

I bought this one first and then I bought this one after.

I have a friend who was an art dealer.

I liked this one so much that I asked him if he could get me another one, and he couldn't, but he was able to get me this plate.

He was an art dealer in faience.

And what are they?

They're Picasso ceramics.

So you probably know that Picasso went down to the south of France in about 1946.

It must have been really nice for him to kind of discover a new medium.

And he visited this show where they were selling ceramics, and he saw the Ramiés, the family who was making ceramics for Madoura, got to know them, and started making some pieces on his own and really liked it and went back for many years.

He probably went back for up to 24 years, and he made thousands of pieces with them.

Mm-hmm.

He wasn't painting as much anymore, and he was just really channeling something new and working with motifs from nature and portraits and bullfights, but in ceramic.

And of those 3,500 or so, they picked over 600 and they started making editions.

This one was done in an edition of 500, and this one, an edition of 450.

And they were designed very close to each other.

This one was a little bit earlier, 1954.

This one was 1955.

Mm-hmm.

And if you can't afford a Picasso painting, you can still afford these lovely ceramics.

But the prices are going up, and they're going up pretty quickly.

Now this one, which is called "Gray Engraved Pitcher," which may very well be a descriptive title and not an actual title that Picasso would have given it, has this decoration of faces and an owl in the middle, and it has some little chips at the bottom, so that's going to affect the price.

These are faience and they are fairly low-fired, so they're prone to chipping.

And I'm going to show the bottom and the mark here.

Do you remember when you bought them what you paid for them?

I remember what I bought the pitcher for.

I paid $1,000 for the pitcher.

So I'm thinking since I bought this probably about less than a year later, it was around the same price.

This pitcher with these chips would probably be, at auction, somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000.

Mm-hmm.

This one seems to me in perfect condition.

The signature on that, the impressed mark, is the same as this one.

This has been doing very well at auction and would probably be fetching somewhere between $12,000 and $15,000.

Oh, that's interesting.

I would have thought the pitcher would have brought more.

The pitcher, had it been in perfect condition, could bring around $8,000, by and large.

Mm-hmm.

Sometimes they bring more, but you can't really count on that.

So the chips bring it down a little.

I understand.

I'm sure I probably put them there.

(laughing) About four years ago, I inherited it from a gentleman that I truly looked up to, and I admired the lamp every time I would go to his home.

And he passed away, and he made sure that lamp went to me.

I think it's beautiful, I love it, I don't know anything about it, I've never had it appraised.

Okay, and how long have you had it now?

Four years.

Now, the base here is this Native American subject, and a little bulb below flickers like a campfire, and this is bronze.

And it is also signed here on the back, "Korff."

Now, Korff is a German artist of the late 19th, early 20th century who worked in bronze and did these lamp bases.

And then we can turn this around again.

Can I take the shade off?

Sure.

I notice you have some putty on there.

The shade, which is interior painted, is signed right over here, "Moe Bridges"-- M-O-E B-R-I-D-G-E-S-- "Company."

Moe Bridges was a company in the early part of the 20th century that did these interior painted shades, but they're far less known than Handel and some of the other companies that were very famous American makers.

Now, there is some record of this company being in Milwaukee and San Francisco, but there's very little known about Moe Bridges.

Mm-hmm.

Now, I don't think this lamp and this shade started life together.

I think that they were put together at some point later, thus being sort of a married lamp.

Mm-hmm.

But in that this is sort of a nice, wooded pond scene, it works very well with the subject matter of the base.

Right.

The base on this is probably older than the shade.

Most of the time, when we bring lamps on, the real money is in the glass shade versus the base.

Here, we have the reverse.

The base is worth much more than the shade itself.

As a married piece, I would think in a retail setting, it would be worth $6,500.

Wow.

WOMAN: This was my mother's.

She passed a couple of years ago.

And I just brought it with me to see if it was worth anything.

It's based around "V for Victory."

This was a watch that was sold during the 1940s during the war, and a lot of the retailers were supporting the war and people were really patriotic.

Cartier is a French company that had a flagship store on Fifth Avenue.

It's got a clip on the back, and you put it on, like, a fine piece of clothing, and you can look down at it and see the time.

Cartier is one of the most premium companies in the world, especially their watches, and things like this are really, really rare and valuable.

A watch like this probably would auction or retail for around $3,000 in today's world.

Oh!

Well, my niece will love that.

That'll help pay for her tuition.

MAN: I brought a Beatles poster from Cleveland, 1966, with the ticket stub.

I bought the ticket, found the posters, the same poster, same concert, Cleveland '66, third tour.

APPRAISER: Tell me about the concert that night.

They were set up on the second base, The Beatles.

We had five-dollar tickets, so we were on the first base line.

The first line, riff, of the third song... (humming "Day Tripper") And so here comes the first guy running through the police, breaking up the police.

The next riff... (humming) Five or ten more!

By this time, the police were all scattered.

The third time... (humming) The whole crowd stands up and waves of people fill the infield.

They had to stop the show.

Yeah, an estimated 2,500 people rushed the field out of 20,000 in attendance.

More than ten percent.

Yeah!

And then what happened next?

Well, they were pushing up on the elevated stage about eight feet high, but they're climbing over each other getting onto the stage themselves.

Now the police are backed up against the drum riser, and the only thing left you can see is Ringo, still playing.

Then they called the show, said, "The boys are going back into the trailer.

They won't come back until the infield is clear."

So about 15 minutes later, it was clear, and they came back and tried again.

Another mob.

Then they called it off, back into the thing, they came back, and finally played about two or three more songs.

Well, printed in Cleveland for the Cleveland concert.

Oh, yes.

And we have the printers marked right here, "Jontzen Cleveland," with the union logo.

Now tell me about the poster and the condition.

Well, I don't remember everything.

It was in a fire, so it's kind of grayed.

It was in a fire in an arts complex I was in a while back, about ten years ago, and it got a little smoky.

But somewhere along the line, it got folded.

Yeah, it's not the best condition.

Have you ever had these items appraised before?

Heck no.

I've been told...

The Pirate said it was worth thousands and thousands of dollars.

He's a friend of mine who dresses up in superhero costumes and is not always a pirate, but we think of him as The Pirate.

And how much did The Pirate think it was worth?

The Pirate said 30 grand, good condition, and I saw numbers like that too.

Perhaps in near mint condition, it could be possible.

The condition it's in is going to affect the value substantially.

The Cleveland concert was considered one of the wildest concerts ever.

Groovy.

And as you've chronicled in your stories, an amazing concert it would have been to have been at.

Starting with the ticket, we have your original ticket you kept from the concert.

That at auction would sell for between $150 and $250.

Okay.

But the poster.

Hmm?

Well, we do have the condition issues here.

There's some paper loss here.

We have the fold line here.

However, it's a very rare Beatles poster from a very famous concert.

Yes.

So at auction, we'd put the estimate on this between $3,000 and $5,000.

Really?

It's yours!

Oh, at auction.

Well, great!

To have it restored, you'd be looking at somewhere between $300 to $600, perhaps, and the value would easily double as a restored piece.

WOMAN: It was my uncle's.

He was a career army officer.

He enlisted at the beginning of World War II, and he stayed in until 1961.

He loved this, he wore it a lot, and he never married, never had children, so it was part of his estate, and his sister gave me all of the jewelry that he had, so that's when this came to me.

And where was he stationed overseas?

I don't know.

I think he was in Japan for a while.

I heard him talk about Macau, so I think he spent a lot of time traveling when he had leave.

Well, that makes a lot of sense because when you see a jade ring, you say, "Okay."

The really good stuff came from overseas from Japan, from China, that's really their diamond.

I mean, people covet jade there the way we covet diamonds.

Do you wear it?

It's a little too big and bold for my taste.

It's too big.

My daughter loves it and I'm not sure that going clubbing with that ring is something that I'd prefer her to do.

Well, it's a pretty tough stone.

As you know, jade is very hard, and that's why it's loved also, and that makes it an important gemstone, just like diamond, which is very hard.

The jade is cut in a cabochon-- that means unfaceted-- and that's typical.

You would not really facet jade.

And if I had to guess, this could have been cut maybe in the 1920s to the 1940s.

It's very difficult without unmounting it to really determine that.

As you can see, this is a beautiful color.

It's very rich green.

It appears to be very even, and that's one of the ways we judge it.

But if you put a light on it, it starts to show a little bit of areas of white coming through, which tells us it's not perfectly green, so it takes it out of the category of a gemstone.

Okay.

However, it is so large.

We never see jade rings in this size.

It's pretty unusual.

The color, the size, and pretty clean are very important.

When I looked at it earlier, I looked at the markings on the inner ring, and it was marked "18K," but also it had Asian hallmarks, and they were for the purity of the gold.

So both corroborate that it's 18 karat.

Okay.

And it came in a box with a retailer, not an important retailer.

So I was hoping to see, you know, like Ming, some major house, but it is in the original box as you received it.

Have you ever had the ring appraised before?

Yes, when I got all of his jewelry eight or ten years ago, I had them appraised, and it was appraised at about $15,000.

I'm very confident that this has not been impregnated or enhanced from the period from the jade that I've seen, but of course without a 100% test, we can't be sure.

So in the market today, I'm going to give you a range, because it's very hard to pinpoint it because of the size.

I would say you're looking at an auction valuation of $60,000 to $80,000.

Wow, I think I'll have to raise my insurance rates.

(laughing) And now it's time for the Roadshow Feedback Booth.

Between bottles and bluebonnets, we were hoping to retire early.

See you at work Monday, boys.

We found out that these things that we've been keeping in a nice place for about 20 years, I asked the gentleman what it was worth, he said it was worth nothing.

So I told him I had two of them.

So I bring it to him, and he said it's still worth nothing.

We came all the way to Antiques Roadshow with this typewriter.

The last words we expected to hear were, "It's got a steam pump patina."

It's been in my grandmother's house since I was a little bitty girl, and I've always wanted to play with it and she wouldn't let me, and I found out today at the Antiques Roadshow that it's worth about ten dollars.

(laughs) I brought my Les Paul Junior.

My parents bought it for me in 1954.

And I found out that it's worth a lot more than I ever made playing in a band.

My husband thought this ought to go in the dumpster, but I wanted to rescue it, and I found out that it's worth $500 to $600 in a shop.

It's his grandmother's antique wedding dress from 1905.

I'm glad I saved it.

And I'm in the doghouse.

And today, I came to Antiques Roadshow for my tenth birthday.

And I found out that my signed first edition copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is worth $100 to $200.

(humming Antiques Roadshow theme) Ugh, I don't know this lady.

I'm Mark Walberg, thanks for watching.

See you next time on Antiques Roadshow.

Hey, everybody, how we doing?

Oh, isn't that beautiful?

Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org