The gurus at the Honolulu Academy of Arts must be capable of misjudging the value of a painting like everybody else. In 1963, they sold a painting for $800 because it was taking up space. Today it's worth an estimated $30,000 to $50,000. Here's the story:

Local history/museum buff John Wright worked for Walter F. Dillingham in 1963. Wright was due to make a trip to San Francisco, and he knew that the Honolulu Academy of Arts had this painting they were trying to unload. It was titled "On a Lee Shore" by an artist named William Coulter who painted ships.

So Wright waltzed into the San Francisco Maritime Museum, buttonholed the founder/director, Karl Kortum, and said, "Do you want to buy a Coulter for $800?" Kortum jumped at the offer.

Then Kortum said, "You sold me a ship, now let me sell you one."

The ship was the Falls of Clyde, for which Kortum had been trying to find a home. The Falls was due to be sold to a lumber company that planned to sink it at a logging camp as a breakwater. Wright brought the news back to Hawai'i, I began to write columns about it, and that's how the Falls of Clyde was saved.

Since then, I've learned a lot more about Coulter's paintings and am due to learn more because the artist's grandson, Tom Coulter, is in town to lecture to the Sons & Daughters of Hawai'i Seafarers at the Hawai'i Maritime Center.

I decided that it would be a good idea if you looked in the closet to see if there's an old Coulter lying around. The artist spent several months in Honolulu in 1882, sketching, and again about 1909. He did some 1,000 oil paintings and maybe 5,000 sketches.

Two Coulter paintings are on exhibit in a San Francisco gallery. The asking price for each one is $70,000.

There are several Coulters in private Honolulu homes. There's also a Coulter at the Hawai'i Maritime Center, a scene of Honolulu Harbor.

He came to Hawai'i in 1882 to paint a huge art panel for a fellow who went around the country lecturing about the Sandwich Islands. In those days, such panels took the place of a slide show for a lecture.

From the sketches made at the time, Coulter later made paintings.

His grandson said the artist was born in Ireland in 1849, ran away to sea at age 13 and landed in California at age 18. Somehow, be broke his leg while ashore riding in a cart with a se–orita. He went to San Francisco and, without lessons, began selling paintings of ships.

I asked Tom Coulter why he's not an artist. He said it's because his grandmother made her children promise not be be painters. They starve.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.