GUEST: I got it from a thrift shop in 1995.

APPRAISER: Okay.

GUEST: In Tampa.

APPRAISER: So, how much did you pay for it?

GUEST: Five dollars.

APPRAISER: Five dollars?

GUEST: Yeah, I had to, just went through a divorce, so I had to fill the walls up with something.

APPRAISER: Well, it's an interesting painting. It's by George Loftus Noyes. And he's really known as a Boston artist, but in the 1890s, he went to Paris and discovered, really, plein-air painting and became sort of an Impressionist. This is a lovely painting here, with very Impressionist strokes and almost getting into pointillism in his works. Beautiful palette, lovely color. One of the things about it, though, is, there are some condition issues. And it's been very yellowed. I don't know if anyone smoked around there sometimes before your time of getting it.

GUEST: Before me, yeah.

APPRAISER: But the main thing is a big split. What happened down here is a split that comes almost three-quarters of the way. It's on a panel, a wood panel, and what happened was, something here hit it repeatedly.

GUEST: Oh, really?

APPRAISER: I don't know whether something... You know, a door came out and a doorknob hit it, or this was being, in a car, being bounced on the road, just pow, pow, pow, and made it split. Now, that can be repaired-- they can butterfly that together, and they have other ways of doing it, and then painting that out, so it'll...

GUEST: Wow. Yeah.

APPRAISER: Well, this is something, if we, if it were put into a gallery, cleaned up like that, you'd probably expect to be asking about $10,000 for it.

GUEST: No kidding!

APPRAISER: Yeah.

GUEST: That wasn't a bad investment, five bucks.

APPRAISER: No. Great.

GUEST: Beats a poke in the eye, doesn't it?