Appraisal Video: (3:00)
Appraisal Transcript:
GUEST: It was a gift to us from my husband's Uncle Harry. My husband's from Montreal, and we were up in Montreal visiting family, and he had a cabinet full of all kinds of things, and he asked my husband to look at it and see if they were of value, and David looked at it and said, "Throw everything away, but keep the vase." A couple of years later, uh, they came to town, to Cleveland, Ohio, where we were living at the time, for my mother-in-law's 80th birthday, and Uncle Harry walked in the door with a large package. Newspaper in a brown bag, which he brought us, uh, some Canadian meats, and said, "Here, I brought you this." And I said, "Thank you." And I went to unwrap it in the kitchen. And also, in the same package with the smoked meat was the vase that he was giving to us.
APPRAISER: Well, I hope it was wrapped separately.
GUEST: It was wrapped separately, but it was just wrapped in newspaper in the same bag.
APPRAISER: Do you know anything about who made it?
GUEST: I just know that it's signed on the bottom: "Quezal."
APPRAISER: Okay. Well, Quezal is a New York glass company. Uh, it was formed by Martin Bach, who was a chemist for Tiffany's. And after a while, he left Tiffany's, and he opened up the Quezal Glassworks in Brooklyn, New York. Now, Tiffany wasn't happy, because he had access to all of Tiffany's styles and designs and formulas for the glass, so the form is actually known as a Jack in the Pulpit-- you know, the jack shape-- or a lily vase. Uh, the base is called an onion base.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And the design, which goes all the way around, is called a pulled leaf design. And if you look, it beautifully goes from the top to the stem, and flares on the base. Now, the front of it is gold iridescent, and each company had their own iridescence. This is Quezal's gold iridescent. The signature is on the bottom of the piece, and it's Quezal, and it's like a black penciled mark. It's hard to read. It almost looks like it's smudged. But that's the way the mark was done. The time frame on this is probably about 1915. The Quezal factory started in 1902, closed in the '20s, so, right in the middle of the time frame. Have you ever had it appraised, or do you have any kind of idea of value on the piece?
GUEST: No. Nothing at all, nothing at all.
APPRAISER: Well, it's actually a very rare size. It's about six inches, and most of the jacks are, you know, 50% to two or three times it in size. Here's a case, though, where the size, even though it's rare, doesn't affect the value the way you'd think. If it was in my store, it would have a retail price of about $3,000 to $4,000. It's not quite as much as it would be as if it was a 12-inch one. The value might be two or three times as you get larger, so even though it's rarer than some of the full size ones, people will still pay more for a big, splashy piece sometimes than a more, you know, subtle, smaller piece. But it's a gorgeous example, much rarer. It's one of the nicest pieces we've seen in a long time.
GUEST: Oh, thank you. Thank you, Uncle Harry. (laughs)
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