'Antiques Roadshow' guest says 'that's terrible' after incredible $300,000 appraisal for her painting

The guest regretted that she wouldn't be able to keep the highly valued item in her home anymore.

PUBLISHED 5 HOURS AGO

Screenshot showing the guest, the painting and the expert on the show (Cover image source: PBS.org/Antiques Roadshow)

Guests on "Antiques Roadshow" come with the hopes of getting a massive appraisal, but even after that, they're consistently left shocked by the value that experts reveal. The owner of a painting by Alfons Walde was shocked to hear the show's expert, Alan Fausel, put a value of about $300,000 on her artwork. While she was happy, her immediate response was, "Oh, that's terrible! Oh! It was such a nice picture to just sort of have around."

Screenshot showing the guest's reaction (Image source: YouTube/Antiques Roadshow PBS)

In the episode on PBS, the elderly guest shared the sweet story of how she got the artwork and how it stayed in her family for decades. "My mom was born in Europe. She went to Switzerland and skied and loved Switzerland. And when she immigrated to the United States, she brought this picture with her, kept it on her bedroom wall all the time, and would tell me about how wonderful Switzerland was," she shared with Fausel. When asked about the artist, the guest admitted that she had no idea who it was or where the painting came from.

Fausel then took over to enlighten the guest and the audience. He explained that the tough-to-read signature was from a renowned Austrian artist called Alfons Walde. "It says "A. W-A-L" and then this is a D, and that's an E, so it's Walde. And he was born in 1891, but he goes off to school to train as an architect, and he's friends with the famous Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, and Egon Schiele, two of the major Austrian architects. And then he goes up to Kitzbühel in Innsbruck, which is the ski resort area, and one of the first artists to do skiing paintings," he further added.

Screenshot showing the expert examining the painting (Image source: PBS.org/Antiques Roadshow)

Fausel told the guest that her mother might have crossed the border to Kitzbühel and skied there in Innsbruck, as that was the place where the artist based himself, to focus on the skiing paintings and the alpine paintings. "This one would probably be around 1935. What's interesting is that in this, he's able to have this bright white against the deep shadows here, and also he does this scene a number of times over and over again," Fausel explained after examining the painting.

"So this is called the Einsamer Berghof. Einsamer Berghof means 'the lonely mountain cabin.' And so he has the figures here. We have a person with a little child being held up there in this mountaintop retreat. One of the things that's distinctive about him is his use of impasto. He has this very thick impasto. Impasto's a built-up paint," he further added.

Screenshot showing the details of the painting (Image source: PBS.org/Antiques Roadshow)

He told the guest that the interesting thing about the painting was that in recent times, the artist's pieces had risen in prominence, leading to a circulation of fakes. "If I were to put an auction estimate on it, I would put it at $200,000 to $300,000." The guest's first reaction was that of regret, but she soon came around to say, "You've made my day!"