GUEST: My sisters and I love to go to estate sales. And we found this painting and a companion painting of some white pheasants at an estate sale last spring. I loved it. I thought the colors were great, and I loved the way the birds were done, so I picked this up, and the other paintings for about $800.

APPRAISER: Well, this is an artist named Charles Robert Knight. He was born in Brooklyn in 1874, and he died in New York in 1953. Have you ever been to the Museum of Natural History in New York?

GUEST: A long time ago.

APPRAISER: Well, Charles Knight painted some of the backdrops that you see the animals in front of in the Museum of Natural History. He also did paintings for the Field Museum in Chicago and for the Hayden Planetarium. This is a great picture. It's very decorative. It's entitled "Golden Pheasant." It's actually a Chinese pheasant, and it's a very well done piece. It's dated down here, and the notation "Faircourt" underneath I would assume refers to the place where it was painted. There are some auction records for the artist. In fact, I found one that had been sold from the estate of Cecil B. DeMille, the movie director.

GUEST: You're kidding.

APPRAISER: So he may have even done some work in Hollywood. But I think this at auction now might be worth as much as $2,000 to $3,000, so for your pair it might be something like $5,000 to $7,000.

GUEST: Oh, that's wonderful.