Ethel Spears Watercolor, ca. 1935
GUEST: In, like 1989, I was working at a government facility in Lexington, Kentucky. They were getting ready to do a bunch of renovation. I kept seeing all these dumpsters and I saw some stuff, lamps and things, I thought was pretty nice. So I asked my boss, "Where is that stuff all going?" He says, "To the dump." I said, "Well, if there's anything in there, that's, that I would like, could I have it?" He said, "Well, sure. Tomorrow, it's going to the landfill."
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: So after work, I went out and looked around a little bit. This was kind of hanging, kind of, precariously out of one of the dumpsters.
APPRAISER: (chuckling) Okay.
GUEST: And I picked it up and looked at it and I said, "Well, this is kind of interesting." I took it home and cleaned the glass off. It had a lot of smoke and nicotine on it. So it's been hanging in our house off and on for a number of years, and we enjoy it. The building started in the early '30s as a federal reformatory for drug users.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: And then later on in its life, the federal prisons moved in there.
APPRAISER: Gotcha. Okay.
GUEST: And when I was there, it was just a minimum security, so there was no fences or anything like that. But then due to demands, they decided they were going to put fences up. And so that was... that started the renovation; opening up walls and pushing things back and...
APPRAISER: I think it's kind of sad that they didn't want this in a prison, I think this could cheer up a prison.
GUEST: Yeah, that's-that's what I think the whole purpose was, I think, originally, because it is kind of a happy scene.
APPRAISER: Mm-hmm.
GUEST: And, and it could have worked very well there. (chuckles)
APPRAISER: Yeah, absolutely. This work is by Ethel Spears. It's, uh, signed here, lower right. You can see it's very tiny. And it is watercolor and gouache and pencil on paper. Ethel Spears was born in 1903 and she died in 1974. She initially trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in tapestry and textiles. As I understand it, she finished her training and then decided, no, I don't want to do that, and then moved over to paintings. And she studied with a, a modernist muralist, a guy named John Norton. From there, she went to Woodstock, the art colony there, a few years in New York, and then back to Chicago, actually, to the School of the Art Institute, where she became a teacher, and that was in 1937. Before that, she was doing some work for the government. And I think this, this work would have been done right around that time, right around the mid-'30s.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: She was an artist that worked in a lot of different mediums. Tragically, I-I think that ultimately led to her death. While she was at the, uh, School of the Art Institute, she started an enameling program there in '53.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And it seems pretty clear that, that she got lead poisoning through that work; inadequate ventilation. But there were some great things at the Art Institute as well. She met her partner, Kathleen Blackshear, who's another fairly well-known artist, uh, there at the Art Institute. This picture has sort of signature elements of, of Ethel's work. It's very dense-- there's a lot of figures in it, they tend to all be doing fun things. And even where there's not figures, there's a real density of decoration. There's no part of it that's lazy. It looks like this is the original frame, too. At auction, I would think this would be worth in the realm of $4,000 to $6,000.
GUEST: (chuckling) Oh, interesting. Yeah. You're not kidding? (chuckles) Well, not bad for picking it out of a dumpster.
APPRAISER: Straight out of a dumpster. (chuckles)
GUEST: Yeah. Yeah.
$3,000 - $4,000 Auction
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Understanding Our Appraisals
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Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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