'Antiques Roadshow' guest gets a staggering appraisal for a painting 'rescued from the trash'
It's not just family heirlooms and items from garage sales that get a hefty appraisal on "Antiques Roadshow," but something that was picked up from trash could also turn out to be worth a fortune. A guest who found a painting worth five figures in a trash pile. The guest who brought a John Rae illustration to the show was left in shock by the appraiser, Nan Chisholm, who estimated the value of the painting to be $10,000. In the end, the expert complimented the guest's father, who saved the item from going to waste decades ago.
In the episode of the PBS show, the guest shared the incredible provenance of the item and how it had endured extreme abuse. She shared that the painting was found by her father, who passed away years ago, and when her mother passed recently, she found the item in a closet while cleaning out. "I had heard this story when I was a child, about how they were on a road trip. It was probably the late '50s, maybe early '60s. My dad was stationed in Connecticut at the time, and they were on a cross-country road trip. Dad saw this old barn, a dilapidated building of some sort, that had a trash pile, and he could see this painting in the trash pile. Dad was an artist, so he thought it was interesting, and he stopped and picked this up, put it in the car, and they went on about their road trip. And it stayed in the closet the whole time I was a kid," she told Chisholm.
The appraiser then took over to talk about the significance of the artwork. Well, it's signed down here, John Rae. John Rae was born in 1882. He studied in New York at the Art Students' League under a well-known American illustrator named Howard Pyle. And he contributed illustrative work to about 50 books, and did a lot of work for magazines, as well," she explained.
Chisholm added that the artist wrote and illustrated several children's books as well, and one of them was a book about Alice. "He seemed to be somewhat obsessed with Alice, I think. He felt that the two books written by Lewis Carroll, 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking-Glass', just weren't enough. So he wrote this book called 'The New Adventures of Alice. It was published in 1917, and it was one of the first to put Alice into a different setting, and she encountered various characters from 'Mother Goose' in this book," the expert shared.
She added that the guest's oil-on-paper illustration appeared to be from that book, but it wasn't. "I found that what this is is kind of a mash-up of the two books by Lewis Carroll. So, at the end of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, there are all these cards that fly up towards Alice. So here you see the jack of hearts. Then, at the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice has an encounter with the Red Queen. So he's kind of combined the end of one book with the beginning of the next book," she noted.
Chisholm added that the painting wasn't dated, but going by the publication date of his first book, the painting may have been created in the early 20th century, around 1915. "The painting is oil, and it's painted on an artist's board. This jack of hearts is an actual playing card. So this is oil with paper collage, we would call it," she told the guest.
Before coming to the appraisal, Chisholm noted that many artists illustrated Alice, and John Rae was one of the lesser-known people among them. "It's [the painting] a little bit dirty and a little bit beat-up. I think in a retail setting, the asking price might be around $10,000," she went on to say, leaving the guest in shock. As the guest gasped and said, "Wow," Chisholm added that it wasn't bad for an item rescued from the trash.
"Not at all bad for the trash, no! That's surprising! I didn't know," the guest said in the end, before thanking the appraiser.
