Southern Needlework Picture, ca. 1830
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GUEST:
I found it at an estate sale in Birmingham. And it just looked old.
APPRAISER:
Was it expensive?
GUEST:
No. $200.
APPRAISER:
Did you notice at the bottom here how it looks like it's been patched?
GUEST:
I noticed that today. (chuckles)
APPRAISER:
Okay. It's someone who is really reaching to do something dramatic and have a large-scale picture, but they didn't have quite enough of it, so at the bottom they had to patch in some other little pieces, which they stitched in to extend that ground far enough. It's on silk ground and it has silk needlework on it, as well as a good bit of watercolor, and part of the reason for doing that is it's quick, and it's a lot easier to paint that watercolor on there. Just the silk and material alone was very expensive. A lot of these were worked by schoolgirls who were going to academies. So we've got the work here of a well-to-do young girl, or perhaps a young woman. I would date this probably to the 1830s.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
That's a period when you have a lot of morning scenes uh being painted.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
What is critical to this piece is that it is Southern. There are very few Southern needle works that survive for a number of reasons.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
First of all, the humidity and the bugs are very tough on silk like this.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
The light, all of that degrades this sort of thing very badly. The Civil War, a lot of things had been destroyed. So we have a very small group of Southern needle works of this period to look to, as both comparables on the marketplace, and in museums to help us pin down exactly where this was made.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
I think that the great thing about this is it stands alone on its visual appeal, it's in outstanding condition, there's more research to be done...
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
...and I think what you learn is gonna add to the value. Can we attribute this to a particular academy? Uh, can we trace back through the family and put those pieces together? I would think, at auction, this would likely, uh, fetch $6,000 to $9,000. If you can attribute it to a specific academy, and figure out some of the other pieces of the puzzle here, you might, you might double that.
GUEST:
You could, okay.
APPRAISER:
It's a rare, great object.
GUEST:
Good.
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