GUEST: We got this sculpture from my mother. It's a sculpture that shows her mother on the sofa reading to my mother when she was probably ten or 12.
APPRAISER: Yeah.
GUEST: With her dog, Beowulf, in her lap. I think the sculpture was made by a friend of my grandfather's whose name is Shrady. This was always in my grandmother's apartment in New York.
APPRAISER: Uh-huh.
GUEST: On top of a, a Bible in the big living room.
APPRAISER: Uh-huh.
GUEST: But I never heard any talk about.
APPRAISER: How did your grandfather know Shrady?
GUEST: I think they were classmates at Columbia.
APPRAISER: Well, Shrady went to Columbia. His name was Henry Merwin Shrady. He went to Columbia, and he studied law.
GUEST: As did my grandfather.
APPRAISER: Oh, really?
GUEST: Yeah. Yes, yes.
APPRAISER: Interesting. But he, he went into business for a short while. Then he came down with typhoid fever. And during his recovery, he started to draw and to paint. And he became interested in painting of animals. And his father was a very, very famous doctor, so they shared an interest in anatomy. And Shrady would go to the Bronx Zoo, for instance, and, and sketch the animals. This is a wonderful sculpture of your family, and it's done in this really nice Impressionist style, and very intimate, which is unusual for sculpture. Usually sculptures are what Shrady specialized in, which were monumental pieces. One of his pieces was George Washington at Valley Forge. And then he's also known for a huge, huge sculpture of Ulysses Grant in Washington, DC. And what happened is, he worked on that sculpture group for 20 years.
GUEST: Hmm.
APPRAISER: And he only sculpted for about 22 years. So, most of his time was on that, and he didn't do a lot of other things. He's known for doing this large buffalo called, "Monarch of the Plains." His career really was the sculpture of monuments and these big equestrian pieces. The other thing is that he's self-taught. And what's really lovely about this is the inscription on the back.
GUEST: "To an old classmate and a loved friend of many years, H.M. Shrady, 1920."
APPRAISER: This is very unusual, and in terms of market value, it's a little bit hard to determine it.
GUEST: Yeah, I assumed nobody would be interested in a sculpture of this sort.
APPRAISER: There are other artists of this period. There's Bessie Potter Vonnoh, who did these very intimate scenes of mother and children. So this is, this is a genre that people do like. It's probably worth, retail, in the $20,000 to $30,000 range.
GUEST: Okay.
