Videographer: Scott Shactman
Editor: Alison Harder

WorthPoint – Discover Your Hidden Wealth

The bidding starts at noon (EDT) on Sunday, May 3. Absentee bids may be placed after registering. (All bidders must register.)

Thom Pattie, WorthPoint’s chief Worthologist, has been in the auction industry for 40 years. He and GoAntique dealers looked over the items to make sure descriptions are accurate and informative and the estimates reflect good value, an additional step in the process to ensure buyer confidence when bidding.

Here are a few offerings that might catch your collecting fancy.

Lot 2511930 is a 1969 Marc Chagall lithograph, “The Yellow Background.” It comes from a Galerie Maeght edition of 3,000. The 31-inch-by-22.5 inch poster is listed in fair condition because the outline of a previous matte is visible. A new matte and frame would hide that. Estimate: $275 to $450.

Marc Chagall's "The Yellow Background"

Lot 2512143, a 1920 carved-shell cameo of a red-haired beauty. Delicately lovely and versatile, this 14-karat yellow-gold piece can be worn as a brooch or pendant. It is 2 inches high and in excellent condition. Estimate: $250-$350.

Red-haired lady shell cameo

Lot 2512067 is a litho of an 18th-century François Boucher painting. Boucher (1703-1770) was a French engraver, illustrator, designer and Madame de Pompadour’s favorite painter. Boucher, known for his mastery of genre scenes, captured the sweetness of the moment (”sweetness” depends on how you interpret the woman’s expression). The litho, once part of the Seattle public library art department, is 8.5 inches high and 11 inches wide. In good condition, it is estimated at $25 to $50.

Litho of a 1793 François Boucher painting

Lot 2511970 would make a nice addition to any Florence Ceramics collection. Lovers of these ceramics know that the company evolved from the grief of a mother trying to get over the death of her son. Florence Ward turned to pottery making and developed an expressive style, creating perfectly proportioned graceful figurines. This 7-inch Rose Marie is in good condition, although there is some damage to one her lace sleeves. Estimate: $75-$125.

Florence Ceramics' Rose Marie

Lot 2511986, an 1870 Bohemian glass vanity set. Wonderful for a boudoir, a boudoir in the offing or to add a touch of romance to the bathroom, the three pieces are graced with etched hunting scenes and floriated work. The set is in excellent used condition and estimated at $100 to $150.

Antique Bohemian glass vanity set

With Lot 2511994, you won’t have to worry about people sticking their hands into this Art Deco-period biscuit jar. They’ll be too busy admiring it. Spice up your kitchen by displaying the bright, bright orange jar with its flowers-and-fruit pattern. The top and handle are electro-plated nickel silver. Made by Hampton Ivory, it is 5.5 inches tall with a few specks where color have been lost, some roughness around an edge, but there are no chips or cracks. Estimate for this exuberant 1925 piece is $100 to $150.

Art Deco period biscuit jar

All these items are subject to a reserve price.

For more information on the auction, click here. To create a bidder account, click here.

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth

Join WorthPoint on Twitter and Facebook.

Portrait of Winston Churchill

Do you have any evidence that Washington slept on that bed you want to sell? What about the satin bustier? Did it give more oomph to Mae West’s figure? More curves to Madonna’s? Did that painting really hang in Winston Churchill’s study?

If the answers are “yes,” then you’ve got great provenance.

Great what? In the worlds of art, antiques and collectibles, provenance is something that gives a lithograph, French sideboard or Barbie doll more pizzazz, more interest—more money.

It’s the history of the item. It’s the Hansel-and-Gretel trail of where it began and who owned it or used it along the way.

Establishing provenance for art, antiques and collectibles

What do you need to establish provenance? It’s pretty straightforward—sales receipts, gallery stickers, exhibition catalogs, catalogues raisonnés (for those who took Spanish in high school, that’s French for “carefully thought out,” in other words an annotated catalog), ownership records, newspaper/magazine articles about the work, articles/letters by art experts describing the work and even photographs of the artist or craftsman standing next to it. Audio or video of the artist discussing his or her creation or the testimony of someone close to the artist is also acceptable.

(If you’d like to learn more about an item pictured in this story, click on the image.)

Of course, record keeping through the generations—or even from last week for some of us—can be haphazard. In addition, there are many situations that are beyond control. Some are:

• No records survive for antique works

• Neglect in keeping records or preserving sales documentation when the works have been in the family for centuries

• Dealers and auction houses from previous centuries go out of business

• Wealthy collectors who take great pains to buy and sell anonymously

• Documentation loss due to natural disasters such as earthquake, fire, flooding

• Lack of protection from weather decay or pests

• Losing documents when moving

• Undiscovered or inaccessible archives

In the absence of valid documentation, establishing provenance can be tricky. Especially as the art-market boom has led to a proliferation of forgeries and con men like John Drewe, whose phony art and documentation fooled everyone for decades.

Forged P. Pollaiuolo (1441-1496)

Looted or stolen works, from a wartime era or illegally exported, are a major concern. Be especially wary when buying art and antiques that were in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. With all the complexities of restituting the more than 250,000 Nazi-looted artworks to their former owners or their descendants, a checkered provenance might very well land you in the legal soup.

Henri Le Sidaner’s "Les Arbres Fleuris" (1933)

So it’s important to consult a reputable expert—someone with in-depth knowledge about that particular art/artist, several scholarly articles/publications to his/her name and well-respected credentials in the art, antiques and collectibles worlds.

Expert appraisal and authentication can, on occasion, lead to a startling revelation, as happened in the case of Tammy H. of Colorado. Thom Pattie, the chief Worthologist here at WorthPoint, recognized her  painting as “Coin De Paris, Rue de Meaux,” a work by the 20th-century Japanese artist, Takanori Oguiss. The painting later garnered $103,000 at Sotheby’s. Tammy tells her story in a WorthPoint video.

Tips for establishing provenance

Get certificates of authentication, warranties and guarantees from the seller.

Provenance documents must mention the work in question and must be original.

Check and cross-check previous owners, galleries and auction houses.

Find out what has gone for what at WorthPoint’s Worthopedia, http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia a vast database that contains prices, photos and descriptions of millions of antiques and collectibles. Also take a look at GoAntique’s PriceMiner, which has only a $9.95 monthly subscription fee.

A valuable source for finding out if works were lost or stolen is the London-based Art Loss Register and the International Foundation for Art Research.

Visit

The World Wide Web has opened the door for easier provenance research. No more having to trek to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles or Harvard’s hallowed halls in Cambridge. Some clicks, and a wealth of information is available to you.

The Getty Provenance Index has more than 1 million records going back to the end of the 16th century.

The National Gallery of Art Provenance search allows you to search for information by artist, title and subject. It also provides provenance-search tips.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s site deals with Met-owned works, but can give you a better understanding of what establishing provenance is all about.

Chinese Art –Research into Provenance says its mission is to document “records relating to dealers and collectors who specialized in Chinese art during the first half of the twentieth century.”

Protect your investment in art, antiques and collectibles by spending some time researching provenance. You’ll be glad you did. And be sure to follow Jim Sturgill’s advice on inventorying your collection. You’ll be glad you did that, too.

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth

Join WorthPoint on Twitter and Facebook.

Problems viewing videos?

voxant.com

High ethical standards, sharing their expertise and knowledge about antiques and collectibles, participating in the larger collecting community, being part of something new and exciting–these are just some of the reasons experts in the antiques and collectibles world want to be Wortholgists on WorthPoint’s web site. In this video, Worthologists Christopher Kent, Thom Pattie, William Leigh and James Van Es talk about why they became Worthologists.

Problems viewing videos?

voxant.com

(Video) When you want to sell those valuable items in your closet or attic, make sure you realize their full value. Thom Pattie, Chief Worthologist at WorthPoint discusses WorthPoint’s consignment and brokering service. It is one of the tools on the WorthPoint site for people interested in buying and selling antiques and collectibles.

WorthPoint – Discover Your Hidden Wealth.

Problems viewing videos?

voxant.com

Worthologist Thom Pattie examines and evaluates an antique Carl Zeiss telescope at Treasures from the Attic, a fund raising event held at the Metz Middle School in Manassas, Virginia. Proceeds from the event support the Manassas Musuem.

WorthPoint – Get the Most from your Antiques and Collectibles.

When we think of community most of us think small. We tend to include in that equation, our town, parish or township. It might be even that we think statewide. Few of us think globally.

WorthPoint does.

WorthPoint not only offers a venue for collectors to meet, exchange ideas, ask questions and receive expert advice, but, in this case, gave a small-town community center hands-on know-how.

A month ago, I received a telephone call from Bill Leinbach, a board member of the Birdsboro (Pa.) Community Center (BCC). He had gotten my number through my mother, who still lives near that small community. Mr. Leinbach was seeking advice regarding the possible sale of a historic item. The item in question was a unique Mark Bird Hopewell Furnace six-plate stove, dated 1772, belonging to the Birdsboro Community Center and on loan to the Hopewell Furnace National Site, which is part of the National Park Service.

Sacrifice sale

Mr. Leinbach said the community center needed to sell the stove to raise funds for property upkeep and maintenance. This was a sacrifice sale, a step they did not wish to take. He went on to say that the stove had been on tour with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the ’90’s and was exhibited in New York and Los Angeles.

At the completion of the tour, the curator of the Met’s Department of American Arts suggested a possible figure should the community center, at some point, consider selling it. The Met representative let it be known, conversationally, that the museum might be interested in buying the stove. This is usually how deals in the fine-arts and antiques world get started. Many years later, the Birdsboro Community Center was ready to reconsider the offer and possibly open a dialogue.

The process begins

I invited Thom Pattie, WorthPoint’s chief Worthologist, to look at the stove with me. Thom and I were brought in as experts, appraisers and also as potential WorthPoint brokers. As brokers, a WorthPoint service that demystifies the selling process to an auction house by doing all the contractual-detail negotiation, we had already discussed WorthPoint partner auction houses we thought were best suited to handle a piece of this importance.

Why, you might ask, is this stove important? It was produced by one of the oldest foundries on the East Coast, a foundry that not only manufactured some of the most cutting-edge heating devices of its day but also made cannonballs for the American Revolution. The stove is considered the oldest, intact example of its kind in existence.

Stove’s condition?

We arrived at the Hopewell Furnace National Site and were met by the curator of the collection, Rebecca Ross, and preceded to examine the stove. It was, more or less, in pristine condition. The original door to the stove may have been replaced, a turning-screw fastening was replaced, but the fastening reproduction piece was excellent. The base of the stove, the ornate legs that the stove stands on which is a cast piece separate from the stove, had been replaced. No problem.

The stove was wonderful, decorative and an excellent example of state-of-the-art 18th-century design. Our curator confirmed that the base on which it sat was not original to the stove but would convey should the BCC decide to sell the piece. This was good news.

On our way back to Virginia, Thom and I were excited by the prospect of brokering such a piece and established, as we drove, that the value estimate at auction should be set at a reserve of $25,000. A reserve means that bidding on the piece would be contracted to start at, or slightly below, the estimate and could not be sold for less than that amount.

Local group wants stove to stay local

It is important to mention, as we were later to find out, that an interested party within the Hopewell community had recently offered, when the news that the stove was going on the market, $10,000. These funds would be from private and state-park funds. The offer was made so that the stove would remain at the Hopewell museum and become the property of the Friends of Hopewell. The offer was based on the value listed for insurance obtained by the Met when it shipped the stove in the ’90s.

We told Mr. Leinbach not to consider the offer as the stove was worth considerably more than that and to bear in mind that the Metropolitan Museum had suggested a value of twice as much. I thought that, barring a bidding war, the piece would go for at auction at around $40,000.

We received a call halfway back to Virginia from the curator of the Hopewell museum saying that she was in error about the stove’s base. It had been supplied by the state park system and would not be conveyed.

Stove can go, base must stay

But, I offered, reproducing the conversation that we had had earlier in the day, you said that it would convey, it not being original to the stove, and that the museum would not have any use for it as it was probably not produced by the Hopewell Furnace. She apologized for her error and remained implacable.

Seeing that the conversation would not bear fruit and that we would not ultimately get the stove with the reproduction base, I thanked her for her call and left it at that. Let me explain what the intricacies, should the Hopewell/state park system decide to part with the base, entail. It begins at the state-park level and proceeds through all the state parks in the U.S. If the base isn’t wanted by any park, the process then moves to the federal-park level.

Should the federal parks not want it, the state park then would bring in an independent appraiser to assess the value of the base. Then and only then, at the discretion of the state park, would the decision be made to deaccess (removing it from the museum’s collection through a sale) the piece.

Was the Met still interested?

Thom and I were neither impressed nor too disappointed, though we flagged a bit at that point. So we’ll just find a base or have a reproduction made, we thought. It became a personal mission, at that point, to help the BCC.

We began making calls looking for foundries that would make the base on a “cost” basis or would defray upfront costs until the stove was sold so as not to put additional strain on the BCC’s limited funds. I also let the Metropolitan Museum know that the BCC was interested in selling, asking whether the museum was in a position to make an offer on the stove.

This ignited calls from the museum to Mr. Leinbach and follow-up calls to me. The museum was, indeed, interested and would be making an offer. I informed the Met representatives of the auction-reserve price Thom and I suggested and our projected sale price being in the $40,000 neighborhood.

I also asked if the Metropolitan Museum had any issue with the Hopewell museum making a reproduction of the stove. Knowing that this was hardship sale for the BBC, a copy in the Hopewell Museum would be, almost, as good as having the original. This reproduction could have made out of resin and simulated to look like the original. The Met had no problem with that.

Met makes offer

The Metropolitan Museum came back to the BCC that week with an offer of $40,0000. Thom and I discussed it and agreed, though disappointed that we would not be brokering the piece, it was a good price, and the BCC should consider accepting it. We speculated that the piece might go for a higher price at auction and certainly the Met’s offer would generate interest from other parties.

I told the BBC about this possibility and waited for the board’s decision. It decided to accept the Met’s offer and not take the risk at auction. It was a good decision, and we were happy to be a part of the experience and to be closely connected with a piece of such importance. We were also pleased that its new home would be the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses one of the foremost collections of Americana in the world.

The dice is back in play

Just when you think a sale or transaction is neatly wrapped up, it isn’t. I received a telephone call from Mr. Leinbach. He informed me that Friends of Hopewell had made a formal offer to the community center of—you guessed it—$40,000. This would mean that the center would get the asking price, and the stove would not be leaving the Hopewell Museum, which made the board of directors of the community center happy.

It looked, according to Mr. Leinbach, that the board of directors would strongly consider accepting the offer. Having gotten my feet wet many years ago buying, selling, negotiating for clients, I said that it was important to contact the Met and tell them of the offer and that the board was considering it. The board had not received anything that could be considered binding from the Met, contractually or monetarily, and therefore was not obligated one way or the other.

I also pointed out that the Met might add an incentive to its offer and that the community center should be prepared for that possibility. Mr. Leinbach assured me that the board did not want a bidding war. Nevertheless, I suggested, be prepared if they do.

To date, that’s where it hangs. I am frankly waiting for the next shoe to drop and feel, in a sixth-sense way, that WorthPoint is not done with this yet.

WorthPoint—Get the Most from Your Antiques & Collectibles

Problems viewing videos?

voxant.com

You never know what you will find at Brimfield, the huge antiques and collectibles show in Brimfield, Massachusetts. That’s where Worthologist Thom Pattie met and interviewed collector and author, Bob Eckstein, who is fascinated with snowmen. Eckstein has more than 1200 snowman items in his collection including many antique items. Now he has turned his fascination with snowmen into a book, “The History of the Snowman.”

WorthPoint – Discover Your Hidden Wealth

A website dedicated to collecting model trains calls itself the “World’s Greatest Hobby,” and it isn’t hard to imagine why. Collecting colorful toy train sets is an old and respected leisure occupation. From the time trains arrived as transportation, train sets have been created and collected.

Model train sets range from life-like to O-gauge railroads which are much more toy-like in appearance. Their layouts including tracks, bridges, and entire towns replete with miniature people are known as “hi-rail” within the train collecting culture.

Lionel, Ives, and American Flyer are vintage brands of distinguished value. Trains range from antique and vintage to modern sets with high tech audio and scenery. There are a number of national and international collecting clubs. The most famous story of a train collection’s worth is that of Anthony Bianco of England who began collecting Hornby Dublo trains in the 1970’s. Christie’s values his collection in the hundreds of thousands with a pre-war electric set sold for $4,000.

Like any collectible, condition, brand, and demand play a role in market value. A great deal of time and energy can go into developing a model train set. Collecting valued pieces can be a lifetime of detective work.

Recently, I attended my first National Auctioneers Association (NAA) conference after 40 years in the business, and what a treat! There, I exchanged ideas with fellow auctioneers and learned new tips and modern tricks about auctioning collectibles and antiques.

More than 1,500 attendees from the U.S. and abroad participated in the 59th International Auctioneers Conference and Show held in Nashville. Networking and clinics were the major focus of the conference, where participants had the chance to meet and share the business challenges associated with a declining economy and discuss tactics. The experience gave you the chance to realize you’re not the only one stuck in the pond without an inner tube.

At the conference, I was struck by how much technology has been a major focus in taking the auction community from the 20th to the 21st century. It’s easy to see how auction practices, production and education changed little over the years until very recently. The late 20th century brought about the most profound changes in more than 100 years. Yes, the electronic age with cell phones, computers and the Internet has made all the difference in the industry.

While being knowledgeable is the most valuable asset an auctioneer can have, you can’t be competitive without adding the electronic tools that are available today. Thanks to the digital age, an auctioneer can sell something in Kansas to a buyer in Bolivia or Barcelona with the click of a mouse, expanding the market worldwide, rather than the previous 100-mile radius limit for an auction.

Auctioneers are bringing the world of antiques and collectibles to you via the Internet and its associated technology. The National Auctioneers Association is the largest professional organization for auctioneers. This year’s conference reflected the state of the modern auction and methods available to its conductors. After 40 years of absence, I’m glad I made it to the show and was able to pick up some tips and maybe even some new tricks in the trade!