A GUEST on Antiques Roadshow left fans of the show shocked after insisting her rare Russian chair was “not for sale” after getting it valued.
In the episode aired over the weekend, expert Elaine Binning was seen inspecting the chair in the beautiful surroundings of Bodnant Gardens, North Wales.
The chair, covered in strange inscriptions and featuring unusual design elements, was immediately of interest to expert Elaine.
“I just can’t stop looking at the carving on this chair – where on Earth did you find an oak chair like this?” Elaine asked the guest.
“My mum bought it in 1951 from a gentleman called Mr Fletcher, who’d been working in Russia before the revolution,” she explained.
“And in that time that you’ve known it, have you found anything out about it?” Elaine asked the owner.
“We believe it’s a church chair and it’s got an inscription on it that we have been given a translation for, whether it’s right or not, I don’t know,” the guest replied.
“It reads ‘the quieter you pray, the further you get’.”
Elaine then went for a closer look at the decorative components of the chair, dubbing it “unusual” as she tried to interpret the design.
“Probaly the most unusual part of it is the legs at the back, this sort of arc, and this relates to part of a horses harness,” she said.
“If you can picture in Russia a sleigh being pulled by three horses – a troika – the central horse has an arc like this over it and that’s called a duga.”
The expert then said she thought it belonged to a provincial and working Russian family, and in fact wasn’t a “church chair” at all.
“You probably were led down that route of thinking it might have been a church chair because I think you said the inscription was ‘The quieter you pray, the further you get’,” Elaine said.
She went on to reveal it was just a saying, and not necessarily religious, meaning you would get further by doing things in a quiet way.
She said the “fashionable” chair was based on a famous one made by Vasili Petrovich Shutov, which rose to fame in 1870.
“So it was probably made shortly after the 1870 exhibition,” Elaine added of the copy chair, before going on to value it.
The expert revealed: “If you were to put a chair like this into auction now, it would probably fetch around £4,000 or £5,000.”
But before Elaine could say anymore, the woman blurted out amongst awkward laughter: “It’s not for sale!”
Dispelling the awkward moment, she concluded: “No, I’m going to give it to my daughter in my will.”
It comes days after a guest was at a loss for words when Elaine told him told his £28 watch was worth a MASSIVE sum.
The elderly man brought in a slick Heuer wristwatch for evaluation on the BBC show which he bought with two weeks wages in 1961.
“A good pre-sale auction evaluation would be around £7,000 to £10,000,” the expert revealed.
Antiques Roadshow airs on BBC One, Sunday at 8pm.
