GUEST: I bought this at a thrift store on my lunch about ten years ago, and it was like the last week of December, weather was kind of lousy and I decided to head over to my local thrift store, and this is what I found.
APPRAISER: Oh, that's great. Well, I think you got the blue plate special.
GUEST: Really? Great.
APPRAISER: Yeah, it's a very unusual piece. The body here is copper, has these wonderful stag horn handles, and then the base here has this wonderful wave pattern-- that's actually sterling silver.
GUEST: Oh, really?
APPRAISER: Yeah. And it's stamped. It's from Los Angeles, California. What's interesting about this, it has two different styles. It has this hammered copper technique that was very popular in the Arts and Crafts movement, which was from about 1900 till around the First World War. And then the silver is beautifully done in a very flowing Art Nouveau fashion. It's a three-handle cup, sometimes called a tyg, T-Y-G. When I first saw it, I thought it was a wonderful example of this mixed metal work of copper and silver with the horn on it. And then, it turns out that this is actually a trophy, a dog show trophy. It actually says on it "Presented by Henry Huntington "for the best Golden Cocker Spaniel, "Southwestern Kennel Club Bench Show, Los Angeles, May 1904." So it's really quite early, and that's really what gives it a lot of the value. Huntington was very famous as a philanthropist in California at this time. And what's happened now is there's a tremendous interest in dog-related items-- paintings of dogs, trophies, dog collars-- all kinds of things relating to dogs. So, as a wonderful piece from that period-- from this Arts and Crafts period-- I would have originally thought maybe it's worth $2,000 or $3,000.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: Then I was talking to a colleague of mine who actually organizes auctions just of dog paintings and dog memorabilia, and we were talking about how hot this dog market is. And, as a result, the interest from the dog collector market would actually multiply the value of this.
GUEST: You're kidding me.
APPRAISER: So, you say you paid 35 bucks for it?
GUEST: $35 at a thrift store, yeah.
APPRAISER: Well, the estimate I would put on it at auction now would probably be in the $6,000 to $8,000 range.
GUEST: Oh, my God, I had no idea! That's amazing, that's totally amazing.
APPRAISER: One thing that's important is the condition of the piece. You have the copper here. This is actually in very nice condition. The border here is tarnished quite a bit. You could leave it like this-- I don't think it looks terrible-- but it would polish up to be nice and shiny. But what you have to be very careful about if you do have it polished or if you polish it yourself, is to not polish the copper. If you get any of that polish on the copper, the copper really will be affected.
