GUEST: I first saw it in my grandmother's house. She had a lot of family portraits, which, this is a Dwight family member. Her name was Laura Dwight Sherrard, and that's mostly what I know about it, other than it was one of her favorites.
APPRAISER: Yeah. Well, it's one of my favorites.
GUEST: Oh, really?
APPRAISER: And I'm not even related to you. (chuckles) It's a wonderful New England portrait by an artist named John Brewster, Jr. And he was born in 1766 and died in Maine in 1854. And what's interesting about Brewster is, he was a deaf, and he was apprenticed to a painter, Joseph Steward, and spent his entire life moving throughout New England and ultimately in Maine, painting portraits.
GUEST: Hm.
APPRAISER: And he is one of the most sensitive and one of the most evocative painters that the American folk category has.
GUEST: Hm.
APPRAISER: He always paints with these sort of very subdued gray backgrounds. This portrait would, at auction, conservatively, be worth somewhere in the vicinity of $40,000 to $60,000.
GUEST: (chuckles) Goodness, gracious!
