Vienna Cabinet Plate, ca. 1900
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GUEST:
This was my great-aunt Helen's, and she traveled to Europe a lot. She supposedly got it on one of her trips about 30 years ago, and that's all I know about it.
APPRAISER:
Okay, well, that's good enough. Now, you can see that it is a plate.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
Not a plate that you would consider eating off of.
GUEST:
No. No.
APPRAISER:
This is for looking, not eating.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
It is a, what we call a cabinet plate, and it's made in Vienna, actually, around about the turn of the century. And you can actually tell because the border-- you see this wonderful Art Nouveau border? And actually, the depiction is a woman called Les Bacchantes, which is a woman who worships Dionysus. Basically, a party girl. Grapes in her hair and whatnot. And actually, one of the more significant things about this is that it's signed here in the corner by a man named Wagner, or Vahg-ner. Now, a lot of pieces from this time period are signed by this man, and in truth, if he had painted everything that he signed, he would probably still be painting. But actually, this really is done on a design by him.
GUEST:
Oh, okay.
APPRAISER:
Beautifully framed. Because it's in this shadowbox, the gold has remained nice and beautiful. The painting, the hand-painting on this is fantastic. Typically, you get the hand-painted examples and then ones that are done by transfer print, or like a decal. Well, this is much, much better than that, and actually, we're going to go on a little journey of discovery here. Now, this is a modern framing, so we're not going to hurt anything by doing this. Now, I haven't done this, so I'm pretty sure what I'm going to find. So I'm just going to poke my finger through here and pull this down like this. Don't worry, easy to replace.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
And actually, so what we have on the back here is actually the name of the figure here. That's the title, which is Hebe.
GUEST:
Oh.
APPRAISER:
And then we have this here, which people in the United States call a beehive mark, which in reality is the crest off of the Habsburg family armorial. So actually, and this means from the factory in Vienna, Austria. And so they call this a beehive mark. This is probably another factory mark, and painter's mark down here. So that's exactly what we expected to find. Maker's mark, title, and the painter's mark. Now, going back to the pretty side, these come up, they're actually fairly common. But this example happens to be a particularly good one. One in this condition, framed nicely, beautiful quality, signed Wagner, worth probably around $1,500 to $2,000.
GUEST:
Wow.
APPRAISER:
Very nice.
GUEST:
Great!
APPRAISER:
Very nice.
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