1924 Paul Troubetskoy Sculpture
Appraised Value:
$20,000
IMAGE: 1 of 2
Appraisal Video: (2:12)
Appraisal Transcript:
GUEST: The sitter's my mother. Um, this is 1924, she was seven years old. It's in France, and she was going to school there at the time. She was there with her family. Her father came over to do the reconstruction after World War I. He was a lumber man, and the family was over there living in France.
APPRAISER: How long did they live there?
GUEST: I'm not quite sure. But it was a while.
APPRAISER: This is a wonderful bronze. Such an appealing subject. The artist has signed it here. It's Paul Troubetskoy, who was a bit of a fairly colorful character. Signed and dated 1924, and has the foundry mark here. It's a Paris foundry.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And he was born in Italy, son of a Russian prince, second son of a Russian prince, and his mother was an American lyric singer.
GUEST: Really? Interesting.
APPRAISER: And it seemed that he was always ahead of conflict; he moved from Russia to France in 1905, then he left France in 1914 to come to America, and then went back to France in the '20s. So his path of going back to France coincided with your family's being there. He did a whole variety of subjects. He did animal topics, he did famous personalities, politicians of the time, intellectual thinkers,
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: authors and illustrators. But his real flourishing part of his career was doing society, society portraits. A lot of artists earned their living traveling in high society and documenting family life. So there are lots of elegant men and women that had their portraits done and, obviously, the sort of charming young children as well.
GUEST: Wow. Yeah. Well, it's so fascinating to hear what you say because it's just been my mom, you know, in our house, and I, you know, never really thought about it.
APPRAISER: I did a little bit of price research and talked with some of my colleagues. And some of the figures that have come up on the market tend to be less personal in nature and more sort of recognizable. But it still has a considerable value, and if you had to find something by this artist of a comparable scale, you'd expect to pay, you know retail price, in the $20,000 range.
GUEST: Wow, wow.
APPRAISER: So you've got a very valuable piece.
GUEST: Wow. We've always loved it, so...
APPRAISER: Well, thanks for sharing it with us.
GUEST: Oh, thank you so much, and thank you for all your research. It's good to know.
