Leveille-Rousseau Vase, ca. 1890
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GUEST:
My husband bought it from a fellow that bought estates in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm sure he didn't pay more than $20 or $30 for it. That's all I know.
APPRAISER:
What you have is a beautiful piece of French Art Nouveau glass. Now, in the French glass, the two names that people think of are …Emile GallÈ and Daum Nancy. There were a number of artists who started working in the 1880s and worked into the early 1900s, and two of them were Ernest LÈveillÈ and Eugene Rousseau. And what you have here is an unsigned piece by Ernest LÈveillÈ, Eugene Rousseau. And that's not uncommon, because the majority of their pieces are unsigned. The date of this piece would be from the middle 1880s to the very, very early 1900s. They did beautiful blown glass. On most of their pieces, they put colored inclusions. Here you have the red and the white in the glass to enhance it. Then after the glass is blown and it's taken off the stick, it was then wheel-carved. It was put on a wheel and they carved these beautiful flowing designs into the glass. And after that was done, it's fire-polished. They put it in front of a high flame, so instead of it being matte, it had a nice, shiny look to it. The design starts in the front and goes all the way around to the sides, and on the back you have the same thing. You see the veining both ways, so it continues throughout the piece. The nice thing about the French is they used a lot of lead, so when you pick this thing up, it weighs a ton. It's a nice quality glass. Now, you said before, it wasn't one of your favorites. Do you have any idea of its value?
GUEST:
I don't. I don't.
APPRAISER:
Okay, well, the value in its condition right now is, I would say retail, between $3,000 and $4,000.
GUEST:
Really?
APPRAISER:
Now, there are a couple of issues. If you look on the back here, you can see that it's got a little bit of a chip or a moon there. And the same thing, there's one section on the base where there's also a chip. If you brought this to a professional glass restorer, I would assume that the cost wouldn't be terribly high, maybe a couple of hundred dollars. And it would probably add 50% or more to the value if you had it restored.
GUEST:
Now I'll take better care of it.
APPRAISER:
(both laughing) If the piece didn't have any damage at all, then you're looking at probably three or four times the value.
Appraisal Details
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Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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