APPRAISER: I have a feeling you were young when you started to play the violin.

GUEST: I was about 12 years old and played through high school. I expected to become a concert violinist, and instead went on to be an engineer.

APPRAISER: So you were serious. You had a good teacher, too?

GUEST: I had a great teacher. He was a violinist, concert violinist in his own right. He's the one that got me interested in trying to get a good violin to go on to a music career.

APPRAISER: I suspect your parents must have taken you seriously in order to fund a new violin.

GUEST: They did-- they made me get a paper route and work to pay for it.

APPRAISER: That's great. So where did you find this violin?

GUEST: My music instructor had gotten multiple violins on consignment from a violin house in Chicago. We played them and we made a decision on which violin to keep, and this is the one we settled on. We got it in 1962, and it cost about $1,200, a lot of money, especially for somebody like myself. It was alleged to be an early 18th-century violin made in, I believe, either southern France or northern Italy. I had no reason to doubt that. Later, about two or three years ago, I had it appraised, and at that time, I was told that it was a reproduction, a late 19th-century reproduction of an early 18th-century violin.

APPRASIER: What was it valued at when you received that second appraisal?

GUEST: The second appraisal told me it was worth about $2,000, which was okay, but wasn't enough. I considered giving it to my granddaughter, who was just taking up the violin in junior high school, and I was going to let her play it through junior high. That's what I know about it today.

APPRAISER: Well, I did a little calculation about what $1,200 in 1962 would be worth today, and I got to the figure of $9,600.

GUEST: That'd be about right, so I was disappointed.

APPRAISER: Well, when I saw this violin, I thought, "This is a serious violin," and so I'm not surprised to hear that you were a serious violinist. And I looked at the label, and it said, "Heyndrick Willems," from Ghent, which is in the Netherlands, and it had a date of 1728. And I looked further at it, and I realized it was from the Netherlands. It's a Holland maker. And it's not an 18th-century violin, but it's an early 19th-century violin. And the maker is from the Cuypers School, so there was a family of makers in the Netherlands that spanned three generations, and they were the Cuypers. And they did beautiful work. What I want to do is just point out a few things that I think indicate that it is Cuypers. School. And that is the varnish. So if you take a look right back here, you can see that there's a certain kind of a dry scaling pattern that's very typical of the varnish of the Dutch school. So they used a glue ground underneath the varnish. And that, over time, creates this kind of dry, scaly look. And then if you take a look at the purfling, the purfling is done in a very masterful way, and it's extremely difficult to do. It's a very bold, very black purfling, but it's done beautifully.

So this is not an inexpensive instrument at all. This is an instrument of considerable class. I can't say with absolute certainty that this is a Cuypers, so I would call it a Cuypers School violin. The label's a false label. I think that somebody recognized that this is a Dutch violin and put a Dutch label in there at some point. This is not a reproduction of an 18th-century violin. This is a really fine, very serious, classy violin made in about the 1820s. The belly is spruce, and then the back... Is a particularly beautiful maple. It's flamed maple-- you can see the flames running across the back. And the value today, a conservative value in the retail market would be $25,000.

GUEST: Oh, great-- that's a lot more than I thought it was. Thank you very much for that good news.