An Antiques Roadshow guest was stunned to learn the wooden bowl she bought on her honeymoon is worth thousands of dollars.
In the resurfaced clip, a woman brought a distressed wooden bowl to a 2017 Antiques Roadshow event in Fort Worth, Texas.
She purchased the bowl she believed to be a Pacific Northwest creation 22 years earlier on her wedding trip to the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
Appraiser Anthony Slayter-Ralph brought the woman to tears when he revealed the item she paid $400 for is worth tens of thousands of dollars.
‘This is my wedding gift. Makes me want to cry because of the history of where I got it and how I got it,’ she said.
The dark wooden bowl bares its age with some discoloration and features a unique decorative end with a hollowed out face.
The appraiser determined the bowl is made out of spruce and was likely made by Native Alaskans in the beginning of the 19th century or even earlier in the 1780s or 1790s.
‘It’s quite extraordinary. I mean, I have never seen, and my colleagues also, one that has this head fixed on the top,’ Slayter-Ralph said.
‘The Eskimos don’t really do decorative art. Everything they do has a function. And they also believed that each of these objects has a spirit in it, the yua, and I think that the head probably represents the spirit of the bowl.
‘Mostly, you see these as finger puppets, and it’s a strange notion. I mean, maybe this is meant to look like a mask and this is the body. One is inclined to think that it would be ceremonial. I mean, we don’t really know.
‘The back, you can also see, it’s actually hollowed out, which makes me think it is a mask in miniature. Very nice grooved carvings around the side here, traces of pigment. There’s been some damage, which has been repaired. I don’t know when– before you got it, I think.’
Slayter-Ralph determined the bowl is worth between $18,000 and $20,000 and with more research could go for much higher at auction.
This valuation brought the woman to tears, leaving her with very few words to say about the piece that carries so much value to her heart.
‘Oh my goodness,’ the woman gasped. ‘Oh my Lord.’