GUEST: This was my grandmother's. I didn't notice it until the last day of her estate sale.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: Probably, however many people came to the estate sale, plus all the family, had their chance to collect this. At the last day of the estate sale, it was in the spare bedroom, and we were just packing up and all that, and my uncle said to me, "Why don't you take this?"
APPRAISER: Yeah.
GUEST: And it was the first I had noticed it.
APPRAISER: I'm glad that you brought the painting, because it's a pretty neat piece of artwork. It's illustrator art. Now, not only do you have this painting, but you have the actual magazine that it was used to illustrate. Battle Birds. Now, you said that you were able to find this copy of the magazine online. Can I ask what you paid for it?
GUEST: I believe $35.
APPRAISER: I think $35 was a fair price. We should say that the artist was a man named Frederick Blakeslee. He was born in 1898, he died, I believe, in 1973, and he was a very prolific artist. He was mainly working in what they call pulp aviation. He did images like this. Many of the images he did in the 1930s were biplanes from World War I. So, this was well into World War II. Artwork like this, because it was sent into a publisher, is rarely signed. But we're lucky in this instance, because we know the artist, and we also know the exact issue. It's a really dramatic photo, but the thing about illustrator artists is, they had to achieve a balance. Not only did they need to encapsulate a lot of action and a lot of activity, but they also had to do it in such a way so that text could be overlaid. Now, if you look at the difference between the painting here and then where they placed the text, up here in the sky and down here in the background, those negative spaces were left on purpose.
GUEST: Ah, I see.
APPRAISER: An editor would have said, "Okay, we're gonna put text here, we're gonna put a headline here," so that's what he was trying to achieve. Now, it's pretty dirty.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: The painting would benefit from a light cleaning. I think that you would get a lot more color out of it, a lot more detail. It is really a wonderfully dramatic image. The market for this has changed dramatically just in the last decade or so. There have been several major collections that have come out, and so it's raised everyone's recognition of the value of illustrator art. There was a time when these paintings, after they were sent in to the magazines, were photographed and then thrown away.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: This is a wonderful survivor. Even though it needs cleaning, even though it needs to be restored, I think in an auction, in a well-advertised sale, you'd be looking at a value on the painting of between $4,000 and $5,000.
GUEST: Wow, okay. That's a little bit more than I expected.
APPRAISER: It's a wonderfully dramatic painting. It's a great example of pulp aviation art. I'm so glad you brought it to ROADSHOW today.
GUEST: I... This made my ROADSHOW. (laughs)
