Longwy Bride's Basket, ca. 1885

Appraised on: June 27, 2009

Appraised in: Raleigh, North Carolina

Appraised by: Stuart Whitehurst

Category: Pottery & Porcelain

Episode Info: Raleigh, Hour 3 (#1403)

Originally Aired: January 18, 2010

IMAGE: 1 of 2  

Appraisal Video: (2:08)

GUEST: I've brought this vase. It says it's made by Cloisonné, and it belonged to my great-grandmother.

APPRAISER: Do you happen to know where she might have gotten it?

GUEST: I don't really know.

APPRAISER: What we have here is a very interesting interpretation of somebody else's artwork. And on the bottom it does say here... it says Cloisonné. And then to the left of that is the name Longwy. And then these other two represent probably production marks. The person who, say, molded the piece,
and then the person who enameled the piece. So it's sort of a form of 19th-century quality control. Now, Longwy is actually the name of the factory. It's spelled l-o-n-g-w-y. It's in the northeast corner of France. And they specialized in making pottery and porcelain. And the word cloisonné, it's a French term that denotes Chinese enamel or Asian enamel. And it actually means "fencing." So, in real cloisonné, what you would do is you would take a metal body and put a series of metal fences around it and fill it with enamel. Well, the way that the people at Longwy accomplished that was really very interesting. Rather than use the little metal wirework, what they did was use little black ink borders, and that's what holds the enamel in place.
So you have the French interpretation of cloisonné. The factory didn't put that under there. That was probably just some helpful uncle to say, “Oh, this is cloisonné here."

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: And this is pottery, not porcelain. That's why you get all of this crackle glazing here. It probably dates to about the 1880s.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: It's a bride's basket. So you've got a nice rope twist top and a beautiful shaped body like this. This shows an incredible amount of effort for something that is a very simple gift from this time period. This would have been a bride's pride and joy in the 1880s. So I would say, at auction, you would be looking at a price of around $1,000 to $1,500. It's really a beautiful piece of pottery. Thanks for bringing it down.


GUEST: Wow. Thank you.