GUEST: My father gave it to me on my first birthday, and it's been in my room ever since, next to my bed, wherever I've lived. And he died three years later, so I actually never found out too much more about it. So I don't know if it's real or not.
APPRAISER: The artist, as I'm sure you already know, is Joan Miró. It's signed right down here in pencil, and it's also a numbered edition. It's numbered over here on the lower left, 37 of 60.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: This is right as rain. It's etching and aquatint. Miró was Spanish. He moved to Paris right around 1920. And it was the Paris of Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway. Art and music and literature and collectors were all coming together, and you see a resurgence of what's called Livres d'Artiste, or "artist's books." And these are books where an author and an artist would really collaborate to create something that was meant to be more integral. It wasn't just a matter of an artist illustrating a book that he'd read. And this is actually one of 23 images that Miró made for a series called, The Ring of Dawn, by the poet RenÈ Crevel. The poet died in '35. This series wasn't actually published until '57. If you were to put this up at auction today, you could expect it to bring $6,000 to $8,000.
GUEST: Really?
APPRAISER: Yes.
GUEST: Wow. That's a nice first birthday present.
APPRAISER: It is indeed.
