Displaying items by tag: Antiques Roadshow

Going the extra mile to authenticate a sculpture they suspected was an original Rodin has reaped a big reward for Quinn’s Auction Galleries. On Saturday, May 17, the metro-Washington, DC company auctioned a bronze-and-marble Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917) sculpture titled Le Desespoir [Despair] for $306,800, inclusive of 18% buyer’s premium. The 13¾ by 12 by 11-inch sculpture had been entered in Quinn’s Fine Art sale with a presale estimate of $60,000-$80,000.

The buyer of the artwork, whose name has not been released, is a collector from Germany who bid over the phone.

During a recent taping of the hit television series, ‘Antiques Roadshow,’ a woman brought a plate that she had acquired in 1970 for $100 to be appraised. For years, the work had hung in her kitchen alongside the rest of her plate collection accumulating layers of grease. The buyer had no idea that she had a modern masterpiece on her hands until five years ago when she visited a gallery and saw a similar plate by Pablo Picasso on display.

As it turns out, the plate was an authentic work created by Picasso in 1955 for France’s Madoura Studio. Stuart Slavid, an expert in European furniture, silver and fine ceramics at Skinner Inc. in Boston, estimated the plate to be worth between $10,000 and $15,000. Although the plate has a small but visible chip, it is still in remarkable condition.

Picasso is a commanding force in the art market and over the past four or five years the prices paid for his works have continued to skyrocket.

A painting featured on the BBC television program ‘Antiques Roadshow’ has been deemed an authentic work by the 17th century Flemish Baroque master, Anthony Van Dyck. The portrait, which was purchased by Father Jamie MacLeod for $660, is estimated to be worth over $660,000.

Fiona Bruce, the host of ‘Antiques Roadshow,’ suspected that the painting was a Van Dyck during taping. After undergoing a cleaning and restoration, the work was authenticated by Van Dyck expert, Christopher Brown.

Father MacLeod plans to sell the painting and will use the profits to buy new bells for his church. 

Viewers of the hit PBS series Antiques Roadshow are familiar with the dealers and auctioneers who appraise the voluminous amount of material brought to each show venue, but what do these experts collect when they are on the hunt? In a new series of articles with Antiques & Fine Art, Roadshow appraisers showcase and discuss the types of objects that make them tick. 

The first expert to be featured is David Rago. At the age of sixteen, David began dealing in American decorative ceramics at a flea market in his home state of New Jersey. Today, he oversees the auction house that bears his name and sells privately in the field. An author and lecturer, he is an expert appraiser for Antiques Roadshow, where he specializes in decorative ceramics and porcelain. Join us as David shares some of the favorite pieces he and his wife, Suzanne Perrault, have collected through the years.

Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Wilmington, DE has established the Wendell Garrett Award, which honors the memory of Wendell Garrett, an esteemed member of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture Class of 1957. Garrett, who passed away in 2012, went on to become one of the most distinguished experts on Americana and American-origin decorative arts in the world. He also made frequent appearances on the television series Antiques Roadshow.

The first recipient of the Wendell Garrett Award will be Gerald W.R. Ward, Senior Consulting Curator and Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture Emeritus at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Like Garrett, Ward has influenced a generation of graduate students and young professionals, most recently as an adjunct faculty member of the Sotheby's Institute Program in American Fine and Decorative Art. Through his work at Yale; Winterthur; Strawbery Banke; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ward has had an indelible effect on the field of American decorative arts.

Ward will receive the inaugural Wendell D. Garrett Award on November 9, 2013 during the 50^th Annual Delaware Antiques Show in Wilmington.

If there is a downside to my otherwise terrific job as executive producer of PBS’s Antiques Roadshow, it’s that I want things—expensive things—that I never wanted before. My wish list is enormous because I’ve seen and touched the best. I even have my own Roadshow fantasy of finding a superb marine painting by James Edward Buttersworth and buying it for less than $100 because it was hiding under a paint-by-numbers board.

As long as I’m in a Roadshow fantasy bubble, I’m going to imagine what would happen if I could shop from among our guests’ treasures. The aforementioned marine painting would be high on my shopping list—either a Buttersworth or an Antonio Jacobsen would do. I’d be tempted to acquire a nice little folk art painting by Grandma Moses, and I’m salivating for a Rockwell Kent, just like the one we discovered in Pittsburgh in 2011.

Historian and American decorative arts expert, Wendell D. Garrett, died of natural causes on November 14 in Williston, Vermont. He was 83. Garrett was well known for his appearances as an appraiser on the PBS series, “Antiques Roadshow,” which launched in 1997. Garrett participated in every season of the program and will make a posthumous appearance on the show’s next season, which premieres January 7, 2013.

Prior to his work on “Antiques Roadshow,” Garrett served as the senior vice president in the American decorative arts department at Sotheby’s. He also wrote and edited a number of books on antiques including Victorian America: Classical Romanticism to Gilded Opulence (1993), Monticello and the Legacy of Thomas Jefferson (1994), and American Colonial: Puritan Simplicity to Georgian Grace (1995).

Born in Los Angeles in 1929, Garrett attended UCLA where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history. Subsequently, Garrett enrolled at the University of Delaware and received a master’s degree in early American culture from the school’s distinguished Winterthur program. He later earned another master’s degree in American history from Harvard.

Garrett joined the Adams Papers Project at the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1959 where he served as the assistant editor of the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (1961), a four-volume set that starts with entries from 1755. Garrett is also credited with finding an even earlier Adams diary with entries beginning in 1753. The Earliest Diary of John Adams was published in 1966 with Garrett as associate editor.

Garrett’s three children, four grandchildren, and a brother survive him.

Starting January 7, 2013, Antiques Roadshow will kick-off its 17^th season with three episodes filmed in Corpus Christi, Texas. While the series has a reputation for revealing hidden treasures to unassuming owners, the lost Diego Rivera painting that appears in the upcoming season is truly a rare find.

Earlier this year, Rue Ferguson inherited a painting bought by his great-grandparents in Mexico in 1920. He assumed it was worth some money, but when he took the piece to Antiques Roadshow during their stay in Corpus Christi, he was dumbfounded when he heard the painting was valued at $800,000 to $1 million.

Created by Rivera, one of the foremost Mexican painters of the 20^th century, in 1904 when he was only a teenager, El Albani spent decades out of the public eye. While it is recorded in Rivera’s personal archive, the artist’s family could never locate the painting as it was hanging in Ferguson’s great-grandparents home. For nearly 30 years after Ferguson’s parents inherited the painting, they believed it to be a fake and kept it in storage. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that Ferguson’s father discovered the painting to be authentic and took it to be restored. The family donated the work to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX but Ferguson asked for the painting back when he learned it was no longer on public display.

After visiting Antiques Roadshow and learning just how important a work El Abani is, Ferguson decided to look for a museum that specializes in Rivera’s work and/or Latin American art to house the historic painting.

Once in a while, a television show takes a fascinating question and presents a clear, direct and relatively simple answer.

That's a good moment, and a good moment is what we get from this crossover collaboration between PBS' "Antiques Roadshow" and "History Detectives" over a Civil War tintype that shows a white and black man seated next to each other in Confederate Army uniforms.

The extremely rare tintype resurrects the longstanding question about whether some black men voluntarily fought in the Confederate Army. It shows two Mississippi men, the white Andrew Chandler and the black Silas Chandler, sitting down holding weapons.

The handful of other period photographs or tintypes showing blacks and Confederate whites together almost always have the black person in a subservient position, like standing while the white man is sitting.

In this one, however, Andrew and Silas are literally side by side, and the oral history of the families further complicates the puzzle.

Stories passed through the white Chandlers say the family freed its slaves, including Silas, before the war. If that's true, he put on that uniform as a free man.

The black Chandler family lore has Silas possibly buying his freedom, though it isn't clear when that might have happened.

So Wes Cowan, who assesses the value of antiques and collectibles on "Antiques Roadshow," now becomes a history detective. He combs family archives and public records, then asks experts to analyze the evidence.

The Antiques Roadshow television programme was presented with its most valuable find ever this weekend.

At the Roadshow's stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a man walked into the city's Convention Centre with a set of five Chinese cups carved from rhinoceros horns.

The man, who has not been identified, said that he has had the set since the 1970s and had no idea of their worth.

An appraiser for the show, Lark Mason told local news station KTUL: 'As each one came out of the box my jaw started to drop a little more.

'Then my colleagues looked and their jaws dropped as well.'

Mr Mason put the late 17th century cup set's value at between $1-1.5 million.

It is the most expensive item in the show's 16-year history.

The news, obviously, was sweet music to the owner.

Mr Mason said: 'I was hoping he wasn't going to collapse, but he said that he was glad that he didn't need his inhaler.'