GUEST: I was in San Francisco about 40 years ago, visiting a girlfriend, as a matter of fact. We were down in the Fisherman's Wharf area and went into an art gallery, and there were a number of pieces by a number of well-known artists. Salesperson there said, "Oh, I've got a very reasonably priced Picasso, would you be interested?" And this is it.
APPRAISER: Was that sort of your first clue, "reasonably priced Picasso?"
GUEST: Well, yeah. It was a little expensive for me in those days. I was a beginning teacher, so I didn't have a lot of money to spend, but it didn't seem that bad. It was $300. I managed to find a way.
APPRAISER: You wanted to impress your new girlfriend?
GUEST: Well, she was buying much more expensive art that day. (laughing)
APPRAISER: Well, what we have here is something that you might be familiar with, at least on the surface.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And it is, obviously, a Picasso jug, or was sold to you as a Picasso jug.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And the history of this, you might be familiar with-- Picasso was in Vallauris, France between 1946 and 1955 and met a couple named Suzanne and Georges Ramié. Sort of fell in love with the town, fell in love with clay and began to do a lot of ceramics in and around that time period. Now, as a result, because of the simplicity of some of these things, when you look at that, your sort of instant thought is Picasso, and that's what you think.
GUEST: It may be.
APPRAISER: Okay. This is a form called visage, which is French means "face." It is usually is fairly simplistic form to make, beautiful, elegant design, and I want to point out, on the bottom here... we have "Edition Picasso" and then "Madoura." It was the Madoura Pottery Works. But you noticed on the bottom there's no edition size.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: I'm sure that concerned you at some point. In today's world, because of the elegant simplicity of doing Picasso ceramics, and because of his fame at an early date, there are a lot of Picasso ceramics that are actually faked out there.
GUEST: Not surprising, right.
APPRAISER: Not surprising. However, in this instance, you do have a receipt. A receipt is provenance. As you know, provenance, chain of ownership, and that receipt is enormously important to us, because then we know that's when he purchased it. It even has your name on it, so that gives us a first and really good clue about whether or not it's real, because some of the fakes today are really, really good. In fact, this is a Ramié, who is the family.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: They actually do numbers. Each of the Picasso editions has a number. And this is number Ramié 288. Although the edition size is not stated on the bottom, it's one of 500 that were done, so...
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Picasso actually didn't lay his hands on this. This was done by a group of skill-set ceramicists. This is 1955, so this is really the last year-- this is just before he leaves Vallauris. So at $300, and that was, what... some years ago.
GUEST: (laughs) 40.
APPRAISER: What do you think it's worth?
GUEST: Well, I don't know. As I thought about it, if it's not a Picasso, it's probably worth maybe what I paid for it. If it is, it's probably worth a few thousand dollars.
APPRAISER: In today's market, at auction, $20,000 would be the price.
GUEST: Okay, well that's not bad. Pretty good return on my money.
APPRAISER: I'd say not much for $300 can bring you $20,000 over time, but it's a terrific example.
