Chinese Glass Snuff Bottles
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GUEST:
They were given to me by a friend who said that his brother was a war correspondent during the Second World War and he collected them while he was in China.
APPRAISER:
Now, did he tell you what they are?
GUEST:
Chinese snuff bottles.
APPRAISER:
That's right. The Chinese had a long tradition of making glass but that tradition changed dramatically when the Jesuits came to China seeking to bring Christianity to the nation. The Jesuits came up with these tools for making glass in the late 17th century. The Chinese took those ideas, they developed them and by the time these were made in the late 18th century or early 19th century, they had a fully formed idea of how to do it themselves. The glass on this example on the right is done in a very elaborate, unusual fashion. The bottle itself is this white glass and all these other colors are applied to the surface. Little specks of glass are annealed to the glass, in fact, and then those are carved on the surface and there's a crab and some insects and there's a flower coming out of a rock, but they're five different colors. That gives you a clue as to the workmanship, the amount of time that it took to make this. The second snuff bottle is also made out of glass, but it's in the shape of a lotus, which has connotations of good fortune and prosperity. This glass is done in a complex manner. The surface, before it was carved, was virtually white. And then that's been carved back so that you get the deeper color in the background. The value of these... the one on the right is worth about $1,500 to $2,000. The lotus example is about the same and maybe, in fact, even a little bit more. So they're really pretty nice objects.
GUEST:
They are because I liked them just because I thought they were interesting and pretty…
APPRAISER:
Well
GUEST:
…but it's nice to know they do have a value as well.
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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