GUEST: It was in my father's estate and my father was an architect and a painter and had wonderful taste. We never got it out. It was in storage. It ended up with me and I got it out a month ago. I saw the name and I did some research and found out who the painter was. And I'd always liked my father's taste so I thought I'd bring it in and find out what you had to say about it.

APPRAISER: The artist is Julien Dupré. We've got the plaque here on the frame. And it's pretty clearly signed here in the lower left. "Julien Dupré." Julien Dupré, French realist painter born in 1851, died in 1910, relatively short lived. This probably would have been done sometime during the second half of the 19th century. He followed a tradition of other French artists such as Jean François Millet and Jules Dupré. And these were painters who essentially were capturing the everyday scenes of life: workers in labor, milkmaids, hay making, threshing of wheat.

GUEST: Yeah, he loved the farm.

APPRAISER: He loved the farm and he was quite adept at capturing the farm. This painting is a great example of Dupré's work. You've got the depiction of the maiden with great optical fidelity. If you're not looking carefully, you almost miss another maiden in the background with cattle. It's very, very realistically painted.

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: Even during his lifetime, you had patrons coming not only from America, from Europe, coming to France to buy his paintings. He studied at the l’e cole des Beaux-Arts. He won numerous awards and medals. In fact, he exhibited at the salon in Paris almost his whole life. Condition is wonderful. It's an oil-on-panel. We were looking before at the back of the panel, the slats going vertically and horizontally. That's called cradling, and cradled panel is something you see in paintings from the 19th century. It helped with the expansion, the contraction, of the panel, to help prevent the panel from moving and creating cracks. He mostly worked in canvas, but this is a really great example, so a little bit rare because it's in panel. It's got a beautiful original frame and the condition is untouched. The restoration of the frame, not inexpensive, but worth doing. In today's market for auction purposes, we would value this painting at $25,000 to $40,000.

GUEST: Wow.