GUEST: My mom found it in an attic back in the '70s, of a neighbor, and she took it because she liked the frame because she was doing pressed flowers at the time. She just took it for the frame. Ended up in our kitchen, then I started liking daisies and she gave it to me for my new house, so now I have it in my bedroom.
APPRAISER: Good, so this made it from the kitchen to the bedroom. That's always progress.
GUEST: Exactly, yes.
APPRAISER: Do you know who painted this piece?
GUEST: George C. Ault.
APPRAISER: George Copeland Ault, that's quite right. And have you done any research on him, do you know anything about the artist?
GUEST: All I know is that he retired in Woodstock, New York. And I'm from Kingston, New York.
APPRAISER: So you're nearby.
GUEST: Which is nearby, yes.
APPRAISER: Well, yes, he was from Cleveland, Ohio, originally. And he came from a fairly wealthy background there. His father was in the printing business and, in fact, took the whole family over to London when he was quite young. But he always encouraged his son's artistic pursuits. In fact, George Ault ended up studying in London for a while at the famous Slade School of Art and also the St. John's Wood School of Art as well. So quite an interesting background. Not typical of many of the American artists working in that time. Eventually came back to the United States about 1911, I believe, and he took all those influences from British Impressionism, from the Surrealists, the Cubists, put them all together, added a bit of a dash of American folk art as well. Was sometimes linked with the Precisionist movement, too, which is characterized often by urban imagery, and there's a lot of geometry in there as well, so you see that.
GUEST: Yes, yup.
APPRAISER: But this is a little different from those paintings.
GUEST: Mm-hmm, yes.
APPRAISER: You know, he did these very interesting urban landscapes and these sort of rural landscapes of deserted barns, very haunting images.
GUEST: Yes. That's all I could find, yeah.
APPRAISER: A lot of people know him for that, but here we have a nice little flower piece. And in this particular instance, the medium that George Ault has used is watercolor and gouache paint. This is the backboard that we took out earlier. So we see, "To Jenny, from George and Louise," who is his wife, and that's in 1942. Well, I wonder whether Jenny might have been... Could it have been the neighbor?
GUEST: It might have been, I do not know. I don't know.
APPRAISER: Then about six years later he was dead.
GUEST: Oh, okay.
APPRAISER: He had a very tragic... (chuckles) life, I have to say. I shouldn't laugh, it really was tragic. His mother suffered from mental illness and died in an asylum. All three of his brothers took their lives by their own hand in a couple of cases because of the stock market crash, and the whole family fortune was wiped out. He struggled with drinking, his eyesight started to fail, and to cap it all, when he was living in the Woodstock area, and of course that was the site of an important artist colony...
GUEST: Yup.
APPRAISER: He was coming home one night, and the bridge he was expecting to find there had blown away or washed away and he ended up falling straight into the river and drowned. Some people actually thought that was a suicide as well. So pretty tragic circumstances. Yeah, I had no idea. His widow, as was, then set about creating his reputation as an artist and did so very successfully. I think at auction, a fair estimate would be $8,000 to $12,000.
GUEST: (chuckling) Okay. And to think my mom just wanted the frame.
APPRAISER: There you are. (chuckles) Pretty glad she hung onto the painting, too.
GUEST: Wow, that's crazy.
APPRAISER: It's a small, but beautifully formed little painting.
GUEST: Wow, okay, I had no idea.
