Spanish-American War Porcelain
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APPRAISER:
Donna, I understand that when you acquired this console set, it caused a little bit of stress in your family, tell me about that.
GUEST:
Just a minor bit of stress. We had just had our third baby.
APPRAISER:
Mm-hmm.
GUEST:
Had very little money, and were going to purchase curtains for our house, and my husband had told me that morning, before he went to this auction, that we didn't have any money for the curtains. Went to the auction, said he wasn't gonna buy anything, and then came back with these three bowls.
APPRAISER:
And when was that?
GUEST:
That was 22 years ago in 1978.
APPRAISER:
And so what did he pay for these three bowls?
GUEST:
$195.
APPRAISER:
Well, $195 is not a small amount of money now, and back then it was a lot more money than it is now. So what did you do when he brought them home?
GUEST:
I sat up the whole night rocking the baby, crying, just knowing that we were probably never going to get out of debt. And instead, we had three bowls.
APPRAISER:
Well, the appear to be from the Spanish-American War. It started as the result of some political unrest in Cuba, which happened in 1895, and the war really took place, primarily, just in 1898.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
All of them have pictures of men, and the one that you have there on the front is Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt at that point was a official in the U.S. government, and he helped organize a group of volunteers for this war called the Rough Riders. And as a result of that, he became a very important political figure, and later became governor of New York, then vice president, and then president when President McKinley was assassinated in 1901. If we look at the right hand side of the bowl there, a scene of the assault on San Juan Hill, which is a famous event. Everything on all this porcelain is completely and totally hand painted. Let's look at the marks on the bottom. This porcelain was made by the William GuÈrin Company in Limoges, France, around the turn of the century, about when all these events happened.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
However, I feel that this set was probably hand-painted in the United States by a very accomplished artist. This was not an amateur hobbyist who was painting these things, because it was so well done. Also because it's so detailed. I think he was probably looking at photographs, or prints, of the war. Here we have a sunken battleship, and that is probably the battleship Maine, which was sunk in the Havana Harbor, and there was a big patriotic cry at the time, "Remember the Maine." There were all kinds of commemorative things made about the battleship Maine having been sunk and the injustice done to the American people. Important things happened because of the war. Not only was Roosevelt later became president, but we acquired Hawaii as the result of this war, and Guam. This set is so unusual, I have lots of questions. Who painted this, why did they paint it, who was it painted for? And we don't know. Because we don't know a lot about it, we have to guess at the price, but we feel confident, at an auction, that this set would bring between $10,000 and $20,000.
GUEST:
Wow.
APPRAISER:
Worth a lot more than those curtains would be worth now, if you got new curtains instead.
GUEST:
He will just be thrilled, I'm thrilled.
APPRAISER:
It's a great set, thanks very much.
GUEST:
Oh, thank you.
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