Olga Fisch Caballito Rug, ca. 1975
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GUEST:
I brought in a rug that my father-in-law had, and I believe he picked it up in Peru or Ecuador in about the '80s, he and his wife.
APPRAISER:
Mm-hmm.
GUEST:
And it's, was in their house till he passed in 2008. And then she kept it for a while, and then my husband wanted it, so she gave it to him.
APPRAISER:
Okay. This is woven by a, a workshop that's called Olga Fisch. It was a woman, Olga Fisch, who started a workshop in Ecuador in 1942. She was a Hungarian Jew, and she and her husband fled Hungary in the 1930s. By 1939, they had actually ended up in Ecuador to escape Nazi persecution. And prior to them going to Ecuador, she collected ethnographic art from all cultures, and she lost her collections when she had to flee Europe. And when she got to Ecuador, she fell in love with the Ecuadorian people, primarily the First Peoples of Ecuador, the Native peoples of Ecuador, as opposed to the Spanish people of Ecuador. And she fell in love with Ecuador folk art and started her company, Olga Fisch Folklore, to create and market Ecuadorian folk art. She saw that the Ecuadorian workers were being exploited, so she created the company to pay them a very fair wage so that they could take advantage of their artistic skills and abilities. And one of the things they made were rugs, uh, which is not a traditional Ecuadorian craft, but it's something she brought in, taught the weavers to do. The company is still in business. Uh, it's run by her grand-niece, uh, and they now make tapestries, uh, other wall hangings, other sorts of, uh, folk art to support local makers. The company had a gallery in Quito, where they were based, in Ecuador, and they were basically selling new things. I mean, even though they started wa, making things in 1942, uh, this was probably made in the 1970s, but it was designed much earlier. It would have been designed in the '50s. And it is signed. "O. Fisch," which is for Olga Fisch, who's the woman who started the company. And it's also labeled. The name of Olga's company was Folklore. So the label says "Folklore, Olga Fisch," gives the address in Quito, "hand made rugs," and then it names the pattern. This particular pattern was called caballito, which translates to "little pony." And then it lists also the size of the rug. And if you look back on the rug, although there's lots of other motifs, some of the primary motifs are these men riding ponies. And the iconography, the design of the rug is based on traditional Ecuadorian artwork, but very much modernized. She gave a lot of freedom to the weavers to create things that were appropriate for today's world, as opposed to just repeating historical things, and the idea of creating something that could move forward. On the retail market today, I actually think the value is somewhere, $7,000, $7,500, in that sort of range. It's a beautiful thing. So thank you.
GUEST:
Thank you very much.
APPRAISER:
Thanks for coming in.
GUEST:
That's a lot more than I thought it was. I was hoping maybe $3,000.
APPRAISER:
Yeah.
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