1912 Leslie Thrasher Oil, Two Boys Riding A Pulling Horse

Appraised on: June 27, 2009

Appraised in: Raleigh, North Carolina

Appraised by: Peter Fairbanks

Category: Paintings & Drawings

Episode Info: Raleigh, Hour 1 (#1401)

Originally Aired: January 4, 2010

IMAGE: 1 of 2  

Appraisal Video: (3:14)

GUEST: A lady that lives not far from where I live, we had bought two old things from her, and we had asked if she had more things that she might want to sell...

APPRAISER: Right...

GUEST: So, this was in 1960-something. And she took me upstairs in her home, and this picture was laying against the wall and very dusty, didn't look too good.

APPRAISER: Right.

GUEST: But I could see underneath all that, and I felt like it was a beautiful picture, and I just fell in love with it. So I asked her, did she want to sell it? And she said, "Oh, you can just have that old thing."

APPRAISER: So it was a gift.

GUEST: It didn't have a frame on it, so...

APPRAISER: Right.

GUEST: I framed it and had it professionally cleaned, and it's been hanging in my home ever since.

APPRAISER: Well, it is signed Leslie Thrasher, 1912. It's a marvelous work by Thrasher, who's a relatively well known illustrator. He is born in 1889 and dies in 1936 and studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After that he gets a scholarship to go study in Paris at l'École de la Grande Chaumière for about a year, so he's in Paris at a very exciting time, 1908-1909. And if we think of what Braque and Picasso are doing in Paris at that time, this is a time of a division of the development of two various schools of art. One is going to be into cubism and abstraction, surrealism, et cetera. And the other is to stay on a road of representational art. And he comes back to Philadelphia in 1910 and studies with Howard Pyle. This is really quite early. So many of the illustrations we see occur after the war. And this has the wonderful thunderheads... Right. ...that are so well known, both you'll see them in the work of Harvey Dunn's, but especially N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle. Unfortunately, Leslie Thrasher's house, summer house, burned in 1936 and he was badly injured by the smoke and, as a result, died from the smoke inhalation. But he also lost a great deal of his work, and not much of his work from 1912 or the earlier period survives. So I think you have a rather unusual and wonderful, charming piece of this painting representing these two boys on this pulling horse of one sort. I think it's charming both for its subject matter and the period, and if this were to be sold in a gallery, I would think it would be kind of minimally $15,000, maybe $20,000.

GUEST: My!

APPRAISER: I think it still needs a little bit of restoration work. There are some specks on it. There's a little damage down in here, but I think another campaign to restore it would probably increase the value by, let's say, maybe 15%, maybe as much as 20%.

GUEST: Thank you so much. I didn't think of it being that valuable. Thank you so much.