GUEST: My mother-in-law got that from a employer of hers several years ago and gave it to my husband and I. She purchased it in Mexico for about $4,000. And we call it "The Eggheads" just because of obviously, obvious reasons. But we know nothing about it.
APPRAISER: But we know they bought it in Mexico.
GUEST: They did.
APPRAISER: In the '60s.
GUEST: Correct.
APPRAISER: It's not $4,000.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: It's actually 4,000 pesos.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Which is about $400 in the mid-'60s.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: This painting is by an artist named Bridget Tichenor. It's oil on panel. You can see it's monogrammed there, lower right. She lived, I think, 13 lifetimes in her lifetime.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And I am going to drop a bunch of names real fast.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: She was born in 1917, and she died in 1990. And for the first part of her life, she was very much a child of Europe. She studied in many places, especially in London and Paris. She's in Paris, and she's a model for Coco Chanel.
GUEST: Isn't that great?
APPRAISER: Through her mother. Her father was a friend-- again, more name-dropping here-- of the Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who was only the first of many photographers to photograph Bridget Tichenor.
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: By all accounts, she was a beautiful woman. Cecil Beaton also photographed her. Irving Penn also photographed her.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: I'm told there's even sort of a niche among photography collectors...
GUEST: Oh, is that right?
APPRAISER: ...who purchase photographs of Tichenor by these various famous photographers.
GUEST: Boy.
APPRAISER: So she's in Paris, and the war is coming. She's also bouncing back and forth to England. And even though it's the 1930s, her mother arranges a marriage, and that gets her to New York in 1939. While she's there, she ends up at the Art Students League. She studies with a very famous American painter named Reginald Marsh.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: But she's also there with another famous American painter, a gentleman named Paul Cadmus, who I think very much influenced her technique. If you look at this panel, it's incredibly smooth and very layered. And it has sort of a jewel-like surface. And that's from a technique inspired by 16th-century painters that Cadmus was particularly fascinated by. And so it's layers and layers, very thin layers and glazes of oil on this work. So the work istitled on the reverse, "¿Sera Cierto?", which loosely translates to "Will it be True?" This painting is dated between 1964 and 1965.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: At auction right now, I think conservatively, we'd be looking at an estimate of $25,000 to $35,000.
GUEST: Is that right? Oh, my gosh-- I cannot believe that.
