Cincinnati Artistic Iron Works Lamp, ca. 1910

Appraised on: August 7, 2010

Appraised in: Des Moines, Iowa

Appraised by: David McCarron

Category: Glass

Episode Info: Des Moines, Hour 2 (#1508)

Originally Aired: February 21, 2011

IMAGE: 1 of 1  

Appraisal Video: (1:58)

GUEST: It's been in my husband's family. His great-uncle Leo had the lamp. Uncle Leo was from Dallas, Texas, and he would travel around in the Midwest, but he'd often stop by my husband's parents' home. My husband's mother, Bonnie, really liked the lamp when she had been visiting. On one of his trips, he brought it to her, and so my husband's parents have had it for a long time.

APPRAISER: Okay.

GUEST: And then at one point they decided that maybe they would sell it, and my husband John and I decided that we didn't want it to leave the family, so we bought it from them. Since we got it, we were curious about it. We were hoping that it was Tiffany, so I kept looking for more information about it, but we never could find a mark, so we figured that it probably wasn't Tiffany. I went to the library, I found an Art Nouveau book, and I found a picture of this in the book, and I learned that it was from the Cincinnati Wrought Iron Works and that it was made in 1910 and that it originally sold for $34.

APPRAISER: Okay. The Cincinnati Artistic Iron Works Company is a fairly obscure company. Now, we see a lot of Tiffany lamps here, Handel, Pairpoint. This company was making these lamps. They made a lot of metal novelties of all kinds, a wide range of art glass items as well. This lamp has a beautiful leaded shade, a very naturalistic tree trunk form base, which was not unlike the Tiffany base. This is going to be 1910, maybe 1915, in that period. This company had galleries in Cincinnati, they had galleries in Chicago. I think probably a good retail price would be around $7,500. It's not the big money lamps, but it's still a very nice lamp to see on Antiques Roadshow.

GUEST: Yes, yeah, thanks.

APPRAISER: Okay?

GUEST: That's good.