1906 Roseville Fujiyama Vase
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APPRAISER:
Roseville's a pottery that a lot of people are familiar with because they made commercial ware for a long time and they were famous for their commercial ware. Commercial ware is when you have a piece of pottery with a design that's molded into the pot, and then an artist, if you will-- use the term loosely-- gets a paintbrush and pushes color onto the embossed areas of the decoration. It's mass-produced, easily repeated by artists of various degrees of accomplishment. Rozane ware is a distinction for Roseville's earliest ware which was made around the turn of the century-- specifically this piece, 1906. Now this, of course, is repeatable in that it's a set design, more or less. It's called Rozane Fujiyama, which is the name of this line. This came as a plain blank, and an artist sat down and all these little squiggles and designs were put on by hand.
GUEST:
Really?
APPRAISER:
Okay, so it's an artist-decorated piece. This technique is called squeeze-bag decoration, and it was popularized by Frederick Rhead-- a very famous American potter who worked for many companies, including Roseville-- where the color, the pigment, is put into a bag and it is decorated as though a baker would decorate a cake by squeezing onto the surface. The mark on this pot is a little hard to see. It's a raised button. It says "Rozane Ware" in that circle. If you get up really close to it, you can see that. And another thing of interest about the piece which points out its unique character is that's the artist's signature. The person who decorated the piece signed it in squeeze-bag, put their signature on the side. This line was created by Gazo Fudji, who was a Japanese artist who was imported by Roseville, just as the famous Rookwood pottery imported Kataro Shirayamadani, the famous Japanese artist. So when Rookwood did something, other companies tended to follow in their footsteps, and this was Roseville's response. What's very special about the piece is that the design is unique to my eye: the stylized poppy blossoms and pods, and it didn't follow the regular design pattern that Fujiyama was supposed to have used. Anyway, in terms of value, normally with the regular decoration, this pot's in perfect condition, the piece would be worth about $2,000 to $2,500. With this decoration, I'd say about $3,000 to $4,000.
GUEST:
Oh! I... I had no idea.
APPRAISER:
I was hoping you didn't.
GUEST:
No, I actually had no idea at all. It's... it's just a terribly sentimental piece. It represents a great deal of love that I have for my grandmother, who is deceased. And I cannot look at it without thinking of her, and the grace and beauty reminds me of her.
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