French Porcelain Vases, ca. 1860
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GUEST:
They came from my father's family, and I'm not 100% sure where they came from.
APPRAISER:
Now, somebody wrote a note about them here.
GUEST:
My grandma wrote that, and she must have done some research on it to try to find out what they are.
APPRAISER:
She wrote here that these are rare; they're Worcester; they're in scale blue, she says; and she puts the dates there of the Dr. Wall period of Worcester. A lot of things that we see at ANTIQUES ROADSHOW come with little notes attached, or sometimes information is actually written on the porcelain. And this can be a good thing to do, to put a little note inside something once you've had it correctly identified. But unfortunately, a lot of the times, the information on the note is not accurate. And I think what your grandmother did, she saw something at Marshall Field's department store, if this was done in, let's say, the 1930s. At that time, Marshall Field's had a fabulous antiques department-- great, authentic things, mostly imported from Europe. And she would have seen a first-period Worcester vase or something that looked like this, but she's unfortunately misidentified it.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
The first period of the Worcester Porcelain Company-- which still exists, by the way, it's called Royal Worcester today-- was referred to as the Dr. Wall period. We kind of stopped using that term because it's not quite accurate. Dr. John Wall was there, but the first period, as we can define it, is a little different in date. In first-period Worcester, scale blue has this deep cobalt blue color that you can see in the background with a kind of scale pattern on it, like a fish scale.
GUEST:
That's what I wondered.
APPRAISER:
Very subtly. The style of it, too, is not quite Worcester.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
Worcester did make vases of more or less this shape, with panels painted in the center, but the handles are quite wrong. And what it's made of. First-period Worcester is made of a kind of porcelain that we call soft paste porcelain. This is hard paste porcelain, which is very sort of glassy-like, very white and shiny. So that is enough to tell us...
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
...it's not first-period Worcester. But in any event, what we've got are a pair of French porcelain vases. They're a really nice quality pair. Probably made 1850s, '60s, something like that. They're in good condition. They're also really nicely painted, but they're not, I'm afraid, anything of this.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
In terms of value. I would say, in a good antique shop today, they'd be priced at at least $1,200 and maybe $1,500 for the pair.
GUEST:
Okay, okay.
APPRAISER:
If they were Worcester of the first period...
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
...they could be $7,000 to $8,000, something like that, or more. But they are great vases in their own right.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
All right, thank you very much for coming today.
GUEST:
Thank you.
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