We saw an Antiques Roadshow highlights program last night and the highlight was a 311 year old doll's house valued at £150,000. A camera crew went to the home to film the object. They weren't called doll houses in the 1700s, they were called "baby houses". This one was considered to be of national significance.
Can you imagine the person valuing the object had seen pictures of it in a 1950s book, but no one knowing if it still existed or where it might be? There are no follow-up articles on whether this went to auction or was donated to a British Museum. All those listings are repetitions of just one article.
What you can look through, though, are summaries and highlights of the most valuable items found on the show. Here's the article of the top 16 items HERE. The top one listed is a model of Antony Gormley's Angle of the North with an appraised value of $1,565,000 and sold for $2,946,300, then a pocket watch by Patek Philippe made in 1914 for entrepreneur George Thompson, sold at auction for $1,541,212 and so on.
Part of the fascination of this show is each person's story of the object. The 1904 Diego Rivera's oil painting with a $1,000,000 value hung behind a door for decades in the parents' home.
And this one: A young man named Richard Hobbs went down in Roadshow history when, in 1993, he presented silver specialist Ian Pickford with a carrier bag full of pieces he didn’t think would be worth much. It turned out to be the show’s most important silver collection. Hobbs discovered that his father had been secretly collecting silver and stashing it under the bed in shoeboxes. The family had very little money and never went on holiday or had any luxuries — and it was suddenly clear where the cash had gone. Richard and his mother Margaret later sold the silver for a total of £350,000.
In 1917, cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths took five photographs to prove that fairies existed at the bottom of their garden in the woods of Cottingley, Yorkshire. It was widely believed to be a hoax at the time, until Arthur Conan Doyle said he believed the story and also set out in 1920 to prove it, giving the girls better cameras to take more fairy photographs.
In 2008, the daughter and granddaughter of Frances caused amazement when they turned up on the Roadshow with the photographs and camera. One of the greatest pranks of the 20th century was valued at £25,000.
The Antique Roadshow came to RBG in the Autumn 2019 and let's hope something fascinating turned up there.
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