GUEST: I've had this for ten years and I thought, "If the show ever comes down, I'm going to take this piece," because I just thought it was different.
APPRAISER: Okay, well, it's an interesting table, and what I want to do is, let's just bend down for a second and take a look at what we have going on down here. And this is the key to what we're looking at. There's a gentleman by the name of Michael Thonet. He perfected a model, what's called bentwood today. Now, he signed most of his pieces, and I don't think this one is necessarily by him. In fact, we're going to put it a little bit later. But he was the man that created this bentwood look. Now let's go back up top here. As we go through here, we see that it's been reverse-painted, so you can't... there's no paint on the surface. Got a little pink that's lost pigment. Now, the secondaries are oak and tulip poplar, which is indicative of Germany at the time.
GUEST: Germany, okay, so this is a German piece.
APPRAISER: Yes, it's a Michael Thonet-style German piece that was made around 1880, 1890. And if you sold it at auction today, I would expect it to be estimated between $1,000 and $1,500.
GUEST: Wow. Thank you.
