The appraiser who looked over Joseph Nāwahī’s “Painting of Hilo Bay” (1888) for “Antiques Roadshow” had several concerns that affected his estimate of the painting’s value. The expert on the show said of Nāwahī’s talent as a painter, he was a “good artist but not a great artist,” Nāwahī not being “academically trained.” When the Ericksons first bought the painting, it was blackened and cracked, necessitating hundreds of dollars worth of restoration. Its worth was determined more by the historical significance of the artist in other spheres of life, and by the scarcity of remaining works by Nāwahī; Jackie Erickson knew of only five, including hers.
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Per the Honolulu Advertiser, Nāwahī’s contemporaries may have had a more generous view of his talents as a painter; an 1868 comment from the Hawaiian-language newspaper Nupepa Kuokoa acknowledged his lack of formal training but predicted that Nāwahī would become a famous artist. That prediction didn’t pan out, but the anonymous reviewer of Nupepa Kuokoa might have had a better grasp of Nāwahī’s artistic worth than PBS’s appraiser. “Antiques Roadshow’s” estimate was an informal one done for television, not a professional assessment. The year after its appearance on the show, “Painting of Hilo Bay” was officially valued at more than $450,000, three times the high end of what “Antiques Roadshow” had estimated. Per the Ka’iwakīloumoku Pacific Indigenous Institute, part of the reason the official appraisal was so much higher was that another Nāwahī painting went on auction and fetched $400,000 around the same time.
