GUEST: This picture hung in my parents' living room for all the years that my brother and sister and I grew up. The story that I was told was that the artist had left the painting with friends of my parents. When those people got elderly, they asked my parents to take care of it, and that's been at least 60 years. That's all I really know about it, though.
APPRAISER: Well, Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was America's most prolific marine painter. He actually painted about 6,000 portraits of steamships in the New York Harbor between 1876 and 1919. And this is a terrific example. It's actually a racing yacht, which is one of his more popular subjects. We often see that he works in a horizontal rather than a vertical format. In this painting he's worked in gouache, which is an opaque, water-base paint, rather than the oil, which he uses most of the time. The boat is so far in the foreground so you're really getting a good look at it with all the sails. And any time you have a racing scene by Jacobsen, it's considered very desirable. It also has a very nice period frame, and it's beneficial to the market that it's been in your family or in the hands of friends of your family the whole time. So I think at auction, this might bring something like $15,000 to $25,000 or even more.
GUEST: Wow, that's great!
