GUEST: It's my great-great-great uncle, and this portrait was painted when he was 11 years old in 1861. And my dad likes to say that it looks like me, which is why I ended up with it.
APPRAISER: Well, there's a definite resemblance, which I just think is quite interesting. John Claude Crawford was born in Warren, Ohio, in 1838, and he studied art and portrait painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia. The quality of the portrait really struck me. We often look at folk art portraits, but we seldom look at these more formalized 19th-century portraits. I think largely because there are so many of them out there and they don't tend to have a great value. Portraits are valued largely according to the appeal of the sitter, unless it's a work by a well-known artist. A beautiful little boy, melancholy or not, is very high on the list. If you were to put this in an auction situation, it would probably sell in the range of $5,000 to $7,000.
GUEST: Oh, really?!
APPRAISER : Could be as much as $10,000.
GUEST: Wow.