GUEST: My aunt passed and I ended up helping to manage her estate. She was a collector of all sorts of things, and these two pictures were among them. And living in Oregon, I thought maybe those were from the Northwest. They looked they might be from the Northwest, so I bundled them with some other stuff and shipped them on home. I suspected they were Japanese, because I knew a little bit about the signature, and I didn't know if they were watercolor or prints, or whatever. So I saw this opportunity and came down to find out.
APPRAISER: Well, what you have is a pair of Japanese woodblock prints by Hiroshi Yoshida, who is a Japanese artist who was born in 1876 and passed in 1950. Very, very famous woodblock print maker, he also did watercolors and he did oil paintings as well. He was fascinated with nature and he traveled widely and came to America in the 1920s and did scenes of America. These are both prints that depict Japanese subjects, but he did do famous American scenes such as Grand Canyon and so forth. Both of these prints, being original, were published by the artist in the 1920s. His original works are signed in pencil. You can see both of these are signed "Hiroshi Yoshida," and the thing that we look for in his genuine prints are these two little characters. They're hard to make out in this print because they're rather faint.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: But they're easy down here, because they're in red. And that's a Jizuri seal. It means, "printed by my own hand." So it proves that they're genuine, and these signatures are actually brush signatures. Both this and this one here, followed by his artists' chop at the bottom. This is a double-size print. He did not do many double-size prints, and most of them were done only in a quantity of no more than 100. So these are quite scarce. We can see the reverse, where...
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: ...there's toning. And this toning is a result of having been against acidic mat. And that can be restored. It's going to be much fresher when we get this acid out of the print.
GUEST: I'll be darned.
APPRAISER: As is, without restoration, the print is worth perhaps $4,500. But with the restoration, which is going to cost around $300, but well worth it, then the print is between $5,000 and $6,000.
GUEST: Wow, very cool.
APPRAISER: That would be a retail price. And this would have a value of, right now, in that condition, it's fine, of about $2,500.
GUEST: That's great! Thank you very much.
