Antiques Roadshow

GUEST

I grew up with them hanging on the dining room wall and never really knew who they were as a kid. But as an adult I determined that they are two of my great-great-great-grandparents on my father's side-- Thomas and Elizabeth McCullough. I received them from my parents when they passed away in 1959.

APPRAISER

Yeah, if you look right over here, it's got the date.

GUEST

Yes.

APPRAISER

1832.

GUEST

Yes.

APPRAISER

According to the census record we found, they lived in Fairfield, South Carolina.

GUEST

Yes.

APPRAISER

Fairfield, South Carolina, is sort of back more in the middle of the state.

GUEST

Yes.

APPRAISER

And due north of there is Greensboro in Guilford County, North Carolina. And once we took these out of the frames and I started looking at the way they were done, I realized that I recognized the artist.

GUEST

Oh.

APPRAISER

Which in folk art is one of those "aha" moments, kind of makes the hair stand up on your arm.

GUEST

Yes.

APPRAISER

And this guy is called the "Guilford Limner."

GUEST

Limner?

APPRAISER

Limner, L-I-M-N-E-R. And basically, he was an itinerant artist, and there's a group of watercolors that came from Guilford County that are all from the 1820s. And he never advertised in the paper, nobody knows where he went afterward or what he did. And I think this is an exciting discovery for several reasons. First of all, it's more than ten years from the other time period that we're looking at, the ones that we know about. And if this guy was an itinerant artist, it would have made perfect sense that he would have gone to wealthy people's homes and done portraits. The characteristic of his work is these very striking faces. He did a combination of watercolor and, I think, gouache, and maybe even a little bit of pastel. And one of the very distinctive things you see is the way this background right here is done. That is like a dining room wall, and that's probably a chair rail. And then he made this look like it was paint decorated. I found that both of your relatives were born in the 1780s, and they both died in the 1840s. I think she died in 1848 or '49, maybe six years after he did. And I just can't tell you how excited I was to realize that we solved... we found some more of these portraits by a known artist. Better than that, we even know who the art...and you're directly descended.

GUEST

That is exciting. I thought they were just family portraits.

APPRAISER

Yeah, well, most people would think that. Not many of these exist, very few of them have ever been on the market. And so we decided to err on the side of caution and say that an auction estimate for these would be $20,000 to $25,000.

GUEST

Wow, that's unbelievable.