GUEST: My husband's grandfather died in 2003. He was 107. And it was, uh, one of the things that was left.
APPRAISER: It's a lovely 19th-century landscape. It does have a signature here at the lower, uh, left-hand side, "Wilhelm Velten," which is a Russian artist, and it's dated 1867. He was born in 1847, so he did it pretty early on in his career.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: And the Russian market has gone through the roof. This artist normally works in a very small format, about eight by ten inches or smaller. And a lot of those paintings have come up for auction, but I only found one record of a painting this large having come up for auction recently, and it brought a lot of money. However, yours has an awful lot of condition issues.
GUEST: Right. (chuckles)
APPRAISER: There's, there's some inpainting right here, there's a lot of craquelure, there's been a tear there. And it's, the canvas has been mounted onto a piece of plywood, so it has a lot of things going against it.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: However, I would give this an estimate of perhaps $15,000 to $25,000 at auction.
GUEST: Wow. Okay, wow
APPRAISER: Now, if it was in a little better condition, you could probably double that.
