Antiques Roadshow

my mother-in-law gave it to me years ago I saw it on her wall and I really admired it and I told her that it reminded me of Charleston South Carolina where I had visited with her son on my honeymoon and she told me that was where she had bought it I think she said she bought it in a street fair but she bought it in the 1950s mm-hmm but I just thought she was charming when you look at her face and her flowers and she has such strength and purpose I love it I do too the artist is Elizabeth O'Neill Vernor it's very hard to make out the Elizabeth is the easiest part to make out of this right here but it is all down here so she was born in 1883 lived most of her life and Charleston travelled a bit but she studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was married with a couple children but her husband died 1925 she said up till 1925 to to hobbies art and her love of Charleston and she was able to combine the two of them into a profession and she really had to make a living as an artist after her husband died she also was known as doing very sensitive portraits of African Americans and particularly did numerous renditions of these flower sellers and at one point the mayor wanted to ban them from being able to sell the flowers on the street and the artist actually fought on their behalf for them to be allowed to remain but her left or Charleston really extended to the architecture and particularly old buildings that were in decay or about to be torn down and she really did a lot for preserving the old building through her art and she was sort of considered the matriarch of the Charleston Renaissance and after she died a lot of her work was actually left to the Metropolitan Museum in New York but at the end of her life which was most proud of was not so much her art but the work she had done as an architectural preservationist which I thought was interesting yes she also invented a certain technique which was layering the pastel on top of silk and then mounting the silk on board and she called it Vernor color although she did a lot of pastels on silk I don't think that's what you have but we would have to have had an franca to be positive have you ever had the surprised no do you want to make a guess as to the value I thought they might be worth maybe five hundred dollars at the most I don't know I my mother-in-law is not a wealthy woman well these are very sensitive dignified portraits and they're held in high regard now there is a condition issue which we can see here with these numerous polka dots I think in this condition it might be worth about $15,000 in a retail gallery but if you were to have it conserved it might be as much as twenty-five thousand well I guess I'll have to say little thank you up to this thank you so much okay mystery solved I love it