GUEST: This painting is a Frederic Church sketch. Frederic Church was a relative of mine. He married my great-aunt. She lived in his estate up in New York on the Hudson, Olana. When I was a little girl, I went to Olana with my mother and she gave this sketch to my mother, and it's been in our family, and recently my mother's died and I got this.
APPRAISER: Do you know where the painting is?
GUEST: I believe it's Persia. I know he traveled a lot in the Mediterranean in the 1800s.
APPRAISER: Well, the interesting thing about Olana is that it's a Persian-inspired building, and he started construction in 1870. But in 1867, he took a trip to Europe and the Middle East, where he would have done this work. It's executed oil on, we think, a paper board. We didn't take it apart, but the surface indicates that kind of material, and not uncommon for small-scale works like this. And it has that really delicious precision that people admire Church for. As far as value goes, and my colleagues and I discussed this a great deal because it is a bit of an unusual subject matter for him, we think that at auction, a conservative estimate would be $100,000 to $150,000.
GUEST: Wow! Oh... (laughs) It was in the basement of my mother's house for a long time.
