Antiques Roadshow

GUEST: In my neighborhood, they were doing,like, "for sale and free."

And so I went and saw this picture, and I bought it because it reminds me of me and my husband.

That's my husband and that's me.

(giggles) The woman that I bought it from told me that her uncle lived in Oklahoma, and he bought it from a Native American artist, but she only wanted $100 for it, and I, I was surprised.

APPRAISER: The artist's name's Acee Blue Eagle.

He was born in 1909 and died in 1959.

Pretty short life.

GUEST: Wow.

APPRAISER: Um, but very prolific.

He is Pawnee Creek.

There's a resurgence of Native art in the 1930s and '40s and '50s, and he's really leading this resurgence from traditional and moving it to the contemporary.

He's using very traditional imagery with the deer, but, uh, adding a stylized element which is more contemporary.

Like, you have the thunderstorm with the lightning and the rain clouds.

He was a World War II vet.

He also was a teacher at Bacone College in Oklahoma.

And he started painting in the 1930s, and he just really took off.

And there's a lot going on at this time with flat Native art.

And you'll see in Santa Fe, you have the Dorothy Dunn School, and even in Oklahoma, there's a group of Kiowa called the Kiowa Six doing traditional works.

But he's really leading this renaissance of traditional art into this new contemporary scene, which hadn't been seen before.

So I believe he made this circa 1940s, 1950s.

It was a later piece for him, it wasn't one of his founding 1930s, '20s-'30s pieces that he would have done.

What do you think it's worth?

GUEST: Well, just the framing alone... (both laugh) GUEST: ...it's, like, I'm gonna guess $1,000 with the frame.

APPRAISER: So I'm taking the frame completely out of this.

The painting on its own, it is tempera on paper.

At auction, conservatively, I would expect it to bring $2,000 to $4,000.

GUEST: Wow-- I don't think we expected that for... (laughs) This is for our grandkids' nursery!

(both laughing) GUEST: This is way better than Peppa the Pig, right?

APPRAISER: I think it definitely beats Peppa the Pig.

(both laughing) GUEST: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

That's awesome.