Antiques Roadshow

GUEST: It's something my sister got at a garage sale about ten, 11 years ago.

I don't think she paid over five dollars for it.

APPRAISER: Yeah.

GUEST: We were taught never to pay a lot at a garage, that much, so... APPRAISER: Yeah.

GUEST: It has its home on my mother's wall in the living room, but to all of us, it's ugly and.

APPRAISER: It's an-an interesting painting.

It is probably the ugliest thing I've seen on the ROADSHOW.

(chuckles) I mean, it's not really a pretty thing.

And I think there's some, some clues here about it that we're going to go through that make this a much more valuable painting than what you might see at a garage sale.

It's a volcano scene.

You can see a volcanic eruption here.

It's done by an artist by the name of Grace Woodward.

Her whole career really doesn't amount to much at all, but she did happen to study with, uh, Whistler and, uh, went to Europe.

She was born around 1858.

But what she did do was she went to Hawaii around the turn of the century.

And, uh, we see this painting here, of... of an eruption of a volcano, and you see it's signed down here "Grace Woodward, 2-26-09."

Now, that's very important.

Now, on the back of it, it says... there's a-- a partial inscription on a label that says "ilauea... I-S...

Hawaii."

And what that is is probably "Kilauea, Island of Hawaii."

GUEST: All right, APPRAISER: And what this is, is a very rare painting.

Even though it is dark, and-- and not very attractive, it's a rare, dated eruption of Kilauea.

What's more important, she probably observed it.

This is done on a panel, an artist board which she would've taken in the field.

And it's also done very close, so she probably went up there to see this in the moonlight and actually paint that from life.

A very rare thing, um, that doesn't come up all that often.

Now, if this were to be sold in the mainland, you might only get, maybe a few hundred dollars for it.

But because it's a rare, early painting of a noted eruption of Kilauea in Hawaii, I would expect this painting to get almost $4,000 or $5,000.

GUEST: Is that right?

It's amazing.

APPRAISER: Yeah, it's its a-- great find, so... GUEST: Wait till my mother hears this.