GUEST: My father, uh, bought this sometime in the, I think it was the early to mid-'70s. I was, like, ten. My dad bought this from Gustave Baumann's widow when she had come to Colorado State University. She was selling some of his work to raise money, selling from the estate. And this one always stopped him.
APPRAISER: Yeah, yeah, not hard to see why.
GUEST: (chuckles) No, it's...
APPRAISER: These colors are beautiful.
GUEST: It's... Yeah, it's just... It says everything about the West, uh...
APPRAISER: Sure.
GUEST: And so he bought it for, like, $125.
APPRAISER: The artist is Gustave Baumann, you know that.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: He was actually born in Germany and came over to the States as a child with his family, and was living in the Midwest.
GUEST: Uh-huh. Midwest, okay.
APPRAISER: He trained in Chicago and worked in Indiana, and it wasn't until about 1918 that he made his way down to New Mexico. He was intending to go to Taos. He got to Taos and he thought it was too busy.
GUEST: (laughs) Okay.
APPRAISER: So a friend persuaded him to move on to Santa Fe. So he gets to Santa Fe and basically plants himself there, and works in Santa Fe for the next five-plus decades. And his imagery have become synonymous with the Southwest. He and the Southwest are so intertwined, and New Mexico, and this feel...
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: ...of, of the Southwest. The feel of... It's...
GUEST: The light, he got the light just right.
APPRAISER: The light through those colors is amazing.
GUEST: I know.
APPRAISER: And the appreciation for his work has just grown over the past couple of decades, and he is super-hot now. Baumann made the original blocks for this color woodcut in 1926, which is just about eight years after he arrived in Santa Fe. And this, you can see, of course, is titled Rain in the Mountains. This is from the fourth edition. He printed four editions of this subject over a 30-year period, starting in 1926, and completing with this fourth and final edition in 1956. The fourth edition is from an intended edition of 50. That's why it's numbered 19 of 50. And the "R-C" next to that numbering means the blocks were recut, reshaped by him...
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: ...to produce this fourth edition.
GUEST: Uh-huh.
APPRAISER: This is the smallest edition, but there are all these intense colors.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: And what's great about this, too, is the way that the rain is coming down.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: In strips from... That, that's just such a great talent, to be able to pull that off by cutting a wood block. And then he mixed all the colors himself, signed it in pencil, titled it, and then this is his hand in heart ink stamp, which he used on his color woodcuts, just his sort of monogram symbol.
GUEST: Uh-huh.
APPRAISER: The appreciation for these...
GUEST: Uh-huh.
APPRAISER: ...like I said, the past couple of decades, has just increased exponentially.
GUEST: (laughing): Okay, now I'm really nervous.
APPRAISER: Would you have... Any guess as to what its value is?
GUEST: Well... Like... I, I, I guessed that, 'cause I know he's popular, but I thought ten times what my dad bought. So, $1,250 or something, $2,000, something like that.
APPRAISER: So you're in the thousands. This is a great image.
GUEST: Uh-huh.
APPRAISER: It's, it's... The more evocative you get with his imagery of the Southwest, the better. It's also one of the larger color woodcuts.
GUEST: Uh-huh.
APPRAISER: So it's got everything going for it. The colors are also perfect, like the day they were printed. It's, that's tough to find. I would put a replacement value or insurance value on this...
GUEST: Uh-huh.
APPRAISER: ...at $50,000.
GUEST: (gasping): Oh, my God! That is so much more than I thought. I think it was. Oh, that is so much more than I thought.
APPRAISER: Yeah, it's, it's a phenomenal print.
GUEST: Okay, I, um... I, okay, I'm, I'm going to have to do something about that.
APPRAISER: Yeah. It's just a beautiful image.
GUEST: Oh, thank you.
APPRAISER: Thank you so much for bringing it in.
GUEST: I, I, thank you for letting me know. That's really amazing. (laughing) Really, really amazing.
APPRAISER: (chuckling): It's an amazing image.
GUEST: Yeah, thank you.
APPRAISER: Yeah.
GUEST: It's always been of value to me, and now I'm going to go to an insurance agent and make sure that I've got it covered.
APPRAISER: Yeah. This one, this one sums up Baumann so well.
GUEST: Yeah. (both laughing) I feel like I'm having trouble breathing a little bit. Oh, my God, you're kidding.
APPRAISER: (laughing): No.
GUEST: I mean, really?
(both laughing)
