Talk about a housewarming gift from heaven.
Decades ago, when a husband and wife moved into their new home, a friend gave them a painting by the man’s former college professor.
Fast-forward 40 or 50 odd years and the oil painting, still in the same family, is appraised during an “Antiques Roadshow” stop in Palm Springs, Calif., for a cool half-million bucks – the most valuable object ever discovered in the show’s history.
“Clearly, the woman who brought this to us knew she had something special,” said executive producer Marsha Bemko. “She just didn’t know how special it was.”
It turns out the painter of the 1937 piece – which depicts a quiet evening scene near Spokane’s Grand Coulee Dam when it was being built – was Clyfford Still, a pioneer of the post-World War II abstract expressionist movement along with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
The rare painting is among Still’s earlier works, created just before he made the transition to his famous abstract style.
A Still painting created just 10 years later recently sold at auction for around $21 million.
“So, in fact, it may turn out that I’m being rather conservative when I say half a million,” the appraiser, Alasdair Nichol, says to the painting’s owner on the episode, the show’s 13th season premiere, slated to air in early January on PBS.
The show’s second-most-valuable object, a signed “Meet the Beatles” album from 1964 estimated to be worth as much as $150,000, also appears in the episode. Palm Springs also offered other highly valuable objects, including a custom-made dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like it Hot.”
“I think watching it in the truck, through the camera lens while it’s being filmed, we have kind of the same reaction that you do when you see the show at home,” said “Roadshow” associate producer Jill Giles.
The Kings Park, LI, native has been with the show since it began and selected the Still painting to be appraised when the owners turned up for the episode taping last June.
“There’s a lot of excitement and ‘Are you kidding?’ and then, of course, we get a security team over to it quickly,” Giles said.
Bemko believes that the economy has had an effect on “Roadshow,” as more people are turning up at its tapings this year.
“My instinct is that people are hopeful that something they own may be worth the kind of money that would be of assistance to them during this difficult time,” Bemko said.
“The other big lesson here is that people don’t want to be the person who puts a six-figure object out in their yard sale.”