Paintings & Drawings

Sydney Laurence Indian Fish Cache Oil, ca. 1922

Appraisal: Sydney Laurence Indian Fish Cache Oil, ca. 1922

Transcript

APPRAISER: If there was one artist that I would have expected to find in Alaska, it's probably this chap here.

GUEST: Yup. (laughs)

APPRAISER: Do you want to enlighten us and tell us who that is? That is Sydney Laurence.

GUEST: He's quite a famous Alaskan artist, although he came from England. Made quite a life for himself here. My husband's great-aunt was a friend of his. And that's how this picture got into our family. (chuckles)

APPRAISER: I'm going to correct you on one thing there.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: It was almost the opposite of England.

GUEST: Oh, it was?

APPRAISER: Brooklyn.

GUEST: Brooklyn? He came from Brooklyn?

APPRAISER: (laughs) Brooklyn, born and bred.

GUEST: Oh!

APPRAISER: 1865, yes.

GUEST: (exhales)

APPRAISER: But you're, you're almost right, because he spent about 15 years in England.

GUEST: Oh, okay. (laughs)

APPRAISER: He was there at the time with a wife and two children, and then he, uh, let's say, pulled a Gauguin and disappeared.

GUEST: Hm.

APPRAISER: And came off, came to Alaska around about 1903, 1904.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: And he was a gold prospector at that time. Quite a colorful character.

GUEST: (laughs)

APPRAISER: Because, uh, before he was doing that, he was in Africa.

GUEST: Oh, wow.

APPRAISER: During the Boer War. He was a wartime correspondent and artist.

GUEST: Oh.

APPRAISER: So he covered the Boer War. He was in China during the Boxer Rebellion. And also in Africa, he covered the Zulu Wars, and in fact got clubbed, which led to him losing hearing in one ear.

GUEST: Oh, wow.

APPRAISER: So he had quite a colorful life, as I say, but circumstance or choice led him to Alaska. He was the first professional artist to really set up stall here, and this is one that he did here.

GUEST: Yep.

APPRAISER: He was in Anchorage from about 1920 onwards. The frame here... Mm-hmm. ...appears to be original to me, and particularly with the label in the back.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: Which is clearly the artist's label. "'Indian Fish Cache,' Sydney Laurence, Anchorage, Alaska." And then right down here, slightly less visible, "Dolly Crawford, 1922." And tell me about Dolly Crawford.

GUEST: She was my mother-in-law's, uh, mother's sister. So she was his, her aunt, his great-aunt, and she came to Anchorage. I don't know a lot about her. She came to Alaska and lived here for a, quite a long time.

APPRAISER: So do you know whether this was inherited within the family, or was it, was it bought?

GUEST: Yes. It was given to Dolly and then it went through part of her family, and they didn't live in Alaska at that time. And my mother-in-law loved the picture and she bought it from them.

APPRAISER: Ah, I see.

GUEST: But we don't, I don't know how much she paid or anything like that-- it was quite a long time ago.

APPRAISER: All right. And, of course, he was really famous for the paintings he did of Mount McKinley, or Denali, as it's known now.

GUEST: Yes, those are beautiful.

APPRAISER: Those enormous snowscapes. So, this isn't quite that. No. (laughing) But this is a, another subject. Can you tell us what this is?

GUEST: This is a cache, and it's what was used to, um, store food and things like that to keep the animals from, um, from getting 'em.

APPRAISER: And we see the, the fish, the smoked fish, I would presume, here.

GUEST: Yep.

APPRAISER: And this would be done in the springtime, looking at the, the colors. It's got a lovely light tonality to it.

GUEST: Mm-hmm. Some of his works could be quite dark, and I, I love just the little flourishes of brushwork that he's done and the flowers that you see here, the little dashes of paint that he's used to describe those. You don't see fish caches many places.

GUEST: No. (laughing)

But I think just over in the distance there, there's one, actually. And have you given any thought to the value of it?

GUEST: Well, my husband said he thinks it's worth $25,000, and I said-- he wanted to know what I thought. I go, "I have no idea." (laughs): "At all!"

APPRAISER: Is he quite an optimistic fellow, your husband?

GUEST: Yes. (laughs)

APPRAISER: I thought he was. At auction, I believe it would make somewhere in the region of $8,000 to $12,000.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: And if you wanted to insure it...

GUEST: Mm-hmm?

APPRAISER: ...I would suggest around about $20,000.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: So he's not too far off.