GUEST: I purchased this about 20 years ago from an elderly man that had furniture for sale in his house and had some out on the porch.

APPRAISER: Right.

GUEST: And I walked into his house and this was kind of tucked away in the back, and it, it just stood out.

I said, I've got to have this piece.

And I've babied it ever since.

APPRAISER: That's great-- well, I can understand that.

It's very, uh, unusual.

When I look at a piece of furniture, the first thing I do is I try to answer the question, what style is it?

GUEST: Right.

20:43 APPRAISER: And, uh, what I see here is kind of an adaptation of a 17th- century style chair.

You've got a basic X-form chair.

It would have had a single back, two arms and an X-form base.

And they've expanded it to a loveseat size.

So this piece was adapted from a 17th-century style, but probably made in the late 19th century, maybe 1890 to 1900.

GUEST: Mm-hmm.

APPRAISER: And it's made of oak that's been stained a dark color.

Hand-painted oval backs with these Arab figures surrounded by brass bosses.

Very, very decorative.

Usually, we think of furniture with a solid wood seat for a hall, because it's a tradition.

You come in from outside, maybe you're wet.. GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: £whatever, you don't want to sit on upholstery.

So it may have been a very decorative piece for an entry hall in a Spanish-style home.

GUEST: That's what I thought.

APPRAISER: They're... the-the paintings themselves are signed, but I wouldn't say that they're valuable as paintings.

Whoever the artist was, it's not really that relevant.

It's really, how pretty is the painting and how much does it add to the settee itself?

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: What are the, what are the decorative merits of the piece?

Uh, we can also date it kind of by, by the quality of the carving here, we can see there's not much definition to it.

It's just a little bit of chip carving here, little chip here, a little bit of lines here, very flat scrolls.

And we-we can look at here where we have actually some leafage.

Pretty simply done.

So that also helps us to date it in that time period... GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: ...aside from the actual style of the piece.

So if I was estimating this for... to place in an auction, I would probably estimate it between $800 and maybe $1,500, somewhere in there.

GUEST: Mm-hmm.

Thank you very much.

APPRAISER: Okay, thank you for coming.