GUEST: It's a picture that belonged to my great-aunt, and she was supposedly the subject in the painting. She lived in Pittsburgh when she was growing up, and her family was a friend of the artist's family.
APPRAISER: The artist being?
GUEST: Elizabeth Shippen Green. And the picture has been in my aunt's possession until she passed away. It went to my father. And then about 11 years ago, he gave it to me.
APPRAISER: Elizabeth Shippen Green is quite an important American illustrator. She goes back to what we call the Golden Age of Illustration in America. She was a Philadelphian.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And she came from an artistic family. Her father was an artist, and she studied first at the Pennsylvania Academy under Thomas Eakins. She subsequently studied at Drexel with Howard Pyle, who's one of the great American illustrators. When she was in Pyle's studio, she met two other women named Violet Oakley and Jessie Willcox Smith.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And the three of them formed this triumvirate of the most important female American illustrators. She was the only woman who was under contract to Harper's Weekly.
GUEST: Oh, cool.
APPRAISER: And she was under contract exclusively to them from around 1900 to about 1920. And with Violet Oakley and Jessie Willcox Smith, she took a communal studio, a living space in Villanova that was called the Red Rose House, or the Red Rose Inn.
GUEST: Oh, okay, right. Red Rose Girls.
APPRAISER: And the three of them became known as the "Red Rose Girls." This is a particularly charming picture, and typical of the subjects that she did in the very early part of the 20th century...
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: ...when she was focusing on illustrations of children. And it's typical of her technique. She would work in charcoal first.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: And apply some sort of fixative over the charcoal drawing.
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: And then work in these glazes over the top with watercolor and gouache.
GUEST (murmurs)
APPRAISER: And she would get these very jewel-like tones of color. She was also known for incorporating outdoor landscape scenes. There's a little tiny example of that here with the window.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Her work has come up at auction, but not frequently. There are about a dozen examples that I've been able to find, and only two or three that are very comparable to, to this particular picture.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: I'd say an auction estimate, conservatively, based on some of those prices, would be between $20,000 and $30,000.
GUEST: Oh, wow. That's nice.
