GUEST: I inherited this from my mother, who passed away in '87. She got it from a lady in Niagara Falls. My mom is from an old Niagara Falls family that goes back to the early 1800s. We all called her Cousin May. I don't know her relationship, really, to our family. We used to go and visit her, and I think that's why she gave the, the painting to Mom.
APPRAISER: Well, the painting is by Albert Bierstadt.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: You can see there, in the lower right corner, that it is initialed "A.B." in kind of a maroon-y red color.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: It's oil on a paperboard. On the back of the painting, there's that label, "Eliza Bierstadt." That's Bierstadt's sister and she lived in Niagara Falls.
GUEST: Niagara Falls, yeah.
APPRAISER: So hence the connection there. So this is uh Mount Hood, actually.
GUEST: Oh!
APPRAISER: So Bierstadt is arguably one of the most famous of our 19th-century American painters, and he made a number of trips west, but he only made one trip to Mount Hood.
GUEST: Hm!
APPRAISER: And that was in 1863. He went there with a very curious fellow named Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who was a writer, a friend of his, and the two of them were going to put together a book. And obviously, Bierstadt was going to do the paintings. They traveled from San Francisco up to Mount Hood. Ludlow was with Bierstadt the whole time, and he was immediately fascinated by Mount Hood. We know he stopped at multiple points and spent days painting Mount Hood. They're not necessarily topographically accurate.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Because Bierstadt was one for drama and feeling maybe being more important. Fitz Hugh Ludlow thought that Bierstadt did some of his best work on this trip. Now, that may have just been for the book, but...
GUEST: (laughing)
APPRAISER: (laughing): ...it sounds good right?
GUEST: Sounds good.
APPRAISER: Bierstadt ended up marrying his wife...
GUEST: Uh-huh.
APPRAISER: ...Ludlow's wife, three years after this trip. So...
GUEST: I'll be darned.
APPRAISER: Yeah, there was a lot of infidelity on both sides of that marriage. The Indians in the foreground are definitely something that we see quite often from Bierstadt's depictions of Mount Hood. The frame, I think, is probably original, but has been repainted at some point. So not, uh, at this point a large part of the value of the picture. If you follow his market, there was a point during his life where it really crashed, frankly.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: He went from the tippy-top, one of the most expensive artists in the market, to being very out of fashion. And then in our lifetime, he's come back...
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: ...to, um, not the same level of prominence he had. He did multiple versions of this painting at a much larger scale. I think, even though it's a small-scale work, you're probably realistically looking at an auction estimate of $40,000 to $60,000.
GUEST: Boy, oh, boy. Hm. That's impressive. (laughs)
APPRAISER: A lot of money for a little picture.
GUEST: Yes, yeah... We had no idea.
APPRAISER: Now, I would say there's an important caveat. Uh, there, there is an expert working on the catalogue raisonné, which is like a complete body of work for the artist. It's part of the art market that if you have that going on...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: ...you got to check with them.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: I'm sure she'd be thrilled to see it, because Mount Hood is not a typical subject matter, uh, but it would need to be authenticated formally.
