One of the most common questions in the antiques marketplace is, “What’s hot right now?” This week at Prices4Antiques.com, we saw porcelain searches beat out stoneware! We saw searches for a Johann Wanzenried charger with a painted scene of Interlaken, German Weimar Katharina pattern china, a pair of Samson armorial vases, a 1910 calendar plate from East Liverpool, Ohio, and a Herend figurine of a kneeling nude woman. These were the top five items viewed in our porcelain section this week, but people searched for thousands of other antiques and collectibles this week at Prices4Antiques.com.
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We churn out reference notes on a variety of topics every month. There’s no telling what we’ll cover next. This month, we’ve done articles on Central American textiles, a Victorian engraver, a modern furniture designer, and an African-American daguerreotypist. These reference notes are one of things that sets p4A apart from other databases and pricing resources, and we work hard to keep them coming. They’re often the product of a great deal of collaboration and are a real attempt to sort out what is all to often several centuries of ambiguity and confusion!
This month, I’ve been attempting to sort out the meaning of the word “scroddle.” That seems simple enough, doesn’t it? It’s a word, so you just go to the dictionary. But most dictionaries didn’t turn up anything and those that did offered only a vague definition like, “mottled pottery made from scraps of differently colored clays,” which would certainly describe the little jar pictured above. (Just fyi, the Urban Dictionary doesn’t have a “definition” at all – go make one up!) But, I thought, scroddle sounds like an OED word if there ever was one! But, according to the helpful young woman at the local library reference desk, nope, not even there!
So, as a last resort, I decided to consult the modern version of the tribal counsel – Facebook. I have a good friend who is a potter and a material culture historian, so I thought I’d just leave a post on her wall and see what she thought. Before long, I had the entire pottery community chiming in, including a former editor of Ceramics in America and assistant curator at Colonial Williamsburg. We got opinions on the origin of the word, why and how the meaning may have changed over time, and a collection of alternate spellings. I’ve been working on sorting so many “mights” and “maybes” into a reference note, but this sort of wide-ranging collaboration and research is really what makes the database special and what makes our reference notes worth reading. The next time you’re doing a search and you see a linked term in an item record, take a minute to click through – you might be surprised at all you learn!
Click here to read our reference note on “scroddle”.
-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com
To search the Prices4Antiques antiques reference database for valuation information on hundreds of thousands of antiques and fine art visit our homepage www.prices4antiques.com
Some of the most ubiquitous antiques are hen-on-nest covered dishes. They’re so common that they’ve acquired a sort of shorthand in the antiques business or become somewhat of a joke, but in reality, they’ve got an interesting history. While people may not realize it, the form – a laying hen cozy in her nest – originated in China several centuries ago and found popularity in Europe in the late 18th century. According to some historians, they were originally used, depending on their size, to serve boiled or scrambled eggs or butter.
Of course, with Europe setting the fashions at the time, hens on nests gained popularity in the United States as well. Exported by places like Staffordshire (where the classic example pictured above was created), they remained fairly expensive until the middle of the 19th century when the technique of pressing glass was developed. Pressed glass made producing hens on nests much more affordable, and this, coupled with the Victorians’ love of animal forms and figures, made them boom in popularity. They began to appear in all different shades of glass and with a variety of finishes. (Hens on nests were such a popular motif that they also appear in candy molds, cast-iron banks, and marble sulphides.) Then around the turn of the century, manufacturers began to cash in on the popularity of the form, packaging condiments like mustard in hen-on-nest dishes to sell. This resulted in examples from many major American glass manufacturers at the time, companies like Fenton and Greentown. Today, collectors can chose hens on nests in carnival glass or milk glass, majolica or Staffordshire, and while the prices they bring won’t always feather your nest, they can certainly make it more colorful!
-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com
Man may have mastered fire millennia ago, but until fairly recently, historically speaking, fire and fire-tending have involved a great deal of equipment and attention. As with many things, we tend to take for granted providing light and heat, illuminating a page, heating up a meal, achieving an accurate temperature to bake bread, but getting a fire started wasn’t always so easy.
Especially after oil lamps and gas lights started to become more common in homes, offering a steady source of a small flame, household mantels began to sport objects known as spill vases. “Spills” were twists of paper, longer than today’s kitchen matches, that were intended to burn long enough to transport flame from lamp to fireplace and to allow the lighter to reach far enough into the fireplace to light a fire. Spill vases, since they were typically intended for a home’s more public rooms and/or were in a position of display on a mantel, are typically very decorative, often some sort of ceramic form with paint decoration. Staffordshire made thousands of them in just about every imaginable form, from courting couples to hunters, whippets to elephants.
Spill vases should not be confused with match holders, which are smaller containers, often of a later manufacture, although often every bit as decorative as spill vases. Usually manufactured as small, individual or connected double containers, match holders come in a variety of forms, from simple glass containers to figural ones in all sorts of shapes. (This one with a figure of a small boy putting on his socks is particularly cute.) Forms like boots or shoes were popular, but many are in animal or insect form: flies, owls, a donkey hauling baskets. Match holders are also occasionally found with several other small containers meant for use as a smoking set that is designed to hold cigarettes and other tobacco-related paraphernalia. Smoking sets, often manufactured by the same companies that sold desk sets, like this gleaming example from Tiffany, can be elaborate, beautifully decorated objects. Both spill vases and match holders occasionally utilize some natural design in order to create a design with multiple holders, like the terrific Majolica spill vase with frogs and lilypads pictured above.
We’re up to our ears in match holders at the moment, after a recent specialty sale by Whalen Auction of over 550 match holders from a single owner’s collection, so there are certainly many examples in the database. A category/type search in the Prices4Antiques database for “kitchen and household”/”match holders” will show you the most recent examples, including the ones from this incredible sale!
-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com
Thank goodness for online shopping, which is the only thing that stands between me and an annual deluge of mail-order catalogues. They tend to pile up along with my intentions to look through them (and actually start holiday shopping early) before I finally give in and recycled them. Of course, they’re ephemera; that’s what’s supposed to happen to them. It’s hard to imagine, but who knows how valuable these catalogues might be to future generations of researchers seeking for information on how we spent our money, decorated our homes, chose our prize possessions?
Catalogues are some of the best resources we have when researching material culture history. Census records, probate files and wills may all help tell us where people lived and what they owned, but when it comes to getting a clearer picture of exactly what those objects looked like and how much they might have cost, catalogues are crucial. Curious about how many kinds of parasols you’d have been able to choose from? You can browse through a catalogue! For people interested in the larger picture of trade routes, style influences and the wages and costs associated with manufacturing, catalogues also help fill in gaps. Looking through old catalogues with images like the Leeds pottery catalogue, pictured above, can tie an object to a particular maker, thereby making it more valuable monetarily or academically, and in some instances, as is the case with the catalogue from the International Exhibition of 1862, it’s possible to positively identify and verify a unique object while piecing together more of its history like those produced for display at the Exhibition.
You’ll find catalogues for everything from early twentieth-century Coca-Cola advertising campaigns to movie poster catalogues designed to help theater owners to select their promotions to nineteenth-century catalogues of American Indian photographs taken by some of the great Western photographers. (It’s not a commercial catalogue, but I can’t talk about catalogues without sharing this first printing of the Library of Congress’s catalogue – it’s 10 pages!) Catalogues and other such ephemera can have great value not just with historians but with collectors as well, especially those with complete collections who want to round them out with documentation, so check the database if you’re cleaning out an old workshop or office. And meanwhile, think of the possible future rewards the next time you’re beating yourself up for still having that stack of outdated catalogues piled up on the back of your desk. Remember that while the modern world may chastise a pack rat, historians everywhere bless the pack rats of bygone eras every day!
See all Ephemera > Catalogues in the p4A database.
-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com