A guest on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow has discovered a painting he bought at a South African curio shop in the 1980s is worth between £12,000 and £18,000 ($16,000 to $24,000), several hundred times its original price.

The painting depicts a pensive young man on a tawny background and is signed by Frans David Oerder, a Dutch artist who emigrated to South Africa in 1890. Frances Christie, the Antiques Roadshow’s specialist in pictures, believes the work was a personal painting carried out at the turn of the century.

“It feels exceptionally fresh, it could have been painted yesterday,” said Christie, an independent art advisor with an expertise in 20th-century British and European art. “Oerder has managed to capture very subtle facial features and the thoughtfulness of this person beautifully. He has made this portrait look effortless. It’s such a spontaneous image.”

The owner of the Oerder painting grew up in Cape Town and moved to the United Kingdom in the ‘80s. He returned frequently to visit family and on one trip in 1988 he saw the Oerder painting in a second-hand shop. “As soon as I saw him [the painting], I thought, I have to have it,” the guest, who paid less than £30 ($40) for the painting, said. “[I was drawn] to its simplicity, how it captured the essence of a person, and the colors are also lovely.”

It is believed Oerder painted the work at the turn of the century. Photo: BBC/Antiques Roadshow.

The painting is unusual for Oerder, an artist best-known today for landscape and still-life works. When Oerder arrived in South Africa, he was one of very few classically trained artists—he had studied at art school in Rotterdam and later toured Italy—and he took on a range of jobs including interior decoration, painting railway posts, and teaching. When the Second Boer War arrived in 1899, he was chosen as the official war artist by the Boer Republic’s President Paul Kruger.

By the 1930s, Oerder was a widely acclaimed in South Africa, a status cemented by his portraits of leading political figures. “Oerder was extremely well known,” Christie said. “This painting wouldn’t have been a commission, it was clearly a boy he came across and asked to sit for him.”

The appraisal was aired in the September 15th episode of the Antiques Roadshow’s latest series. It took place at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, the country home of neoclassical architect Sir John Soane, in Ealing, west London.