Tag archives: elizabeths appraisals
The Boys and Girls Club Thrift Store in Ventura was an unlikely place to find a Kundalini yoga ‘sound bath’ practitioner’s quartz crystal singing bowl, but JE writes me that her “FIND” is a whopping 12” diameter 10” tall delicate blue bowl. She thought it was expensive at $75 (with rubber mallet); shoppers can find […]
My daughter-in-law Meredith asked for the gift of an early 20th century white Damask banqueting tablecloth that had been owned by my great-aunt. Perhaps your family set tables this past season using the “canvas” of a fine tablecloth for the “artwork” – the meal prepared at home. The history of the tablecloth involves art history, […]
Over the holidays, my family treated each other to two nights of a bougie hotel experience in Encinitas, instead of forcing one family member to host Christmas. The pricey hotel experience featured the work of a choice local photographer as artist-in-residence; an ocean-loving surfing creative artist-athlete whose huge glossy canvases transformed the hotel’s corridors – […]
RF has two exquisite Japanese woodcuts, and while she couldn’t quite make out the signature, I can. It is that of Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950), a leading artist of the Shin-hanga (“new print”) movement of the early 20th century in Japan, which focused on the techniques of traditional woodcut or watercolor, but borrowing from the Western […]
This article is about my early 19th century medal, an Order of Knighthood, which may be connected to my partner’s family history. When objects of history lie in a drawer for years (I don’t remember where I got this) and are rediscovered – the find is historically relevant to my partner! You see, my partner’s […]
HH has a 1920s Sterling and enamel medallion from the Royal Antediluvian (‘before the flood’) Order of the Buffaloes in red, white, cobalt, and turquoise; made by Fattorini & Sons LTD., Jewelers, Bradford House, Birmingham. The red ribbon is embroidered ‘RAOB Grand Council.’ The Sterling is hallmarked with a lion and letter E, the piece […]
FF has a nice midcentury example of a technically challenging type of glass; Sommerso, or “submerged” – a technique requiring skill and dexterity which developed in Murano, Italy in the 1930s. His vase is in three colors of glass (colored amethyst to cobalt to crystal clear) and stands at 8” tall. It weighs quite a […]
Kifwebe is a word meaning “mask” for the people of the Congo River basin, the Luba and Songye tribes. High-ranking, ruling elite men in a tribal secret brotherhood called Bwadi Bwa Kifwebe would wear these masks in a ritual dance, complete with a disguise of a woven, tight-fitting net-like costume, animal pelts, and long, thick, […]
HH was told by his grandmother from Boston that the table she left him was made by Duncan Phyfe. Almost everyone who has an East Coast Grandma runs the risk of being told that her family’s furniture was made by Phyfe. For years after his death, Phyfe’s furniture was NOT collected nor desired; it wasn’t […]
Few illustrious tourist attractions in Ohio rank higher than the Reverend Paul Johnson’s Pencil Sharpener Museum located in the middle of the State, a menagerie donated by the Reverend’s wife after he collected approximately 4,000 sharpeners from 1989-2010. He left her holding the collection when he died in 2010. She had no one to blame […]
The house and the barn, built in 1901, was located on a dreary plain on a frontier homestead, 169 acres that her husband chose near Rosette, Wyoming; a work-filled ranch of crops and livestock on the American Prairie which stretched as far as Zertta’s 24-year-old eyes could see. Ten years lay ahead of her, living […]
You know what you look like every morning because you have a bathroom mirror. But until the 15th century no European had a glass mirror, and if you wanted to see yourself, one looked into a lake, or a piece of bronze. When did wall mounted glass mirrors come into existence? HH, who has a […]
JE has a beautiful wrought iron Spanish Colonial Revival Torchiere floor lamp, hand wrought in a time frame from the 1920s to 1930s. When it was created, electricity for lighting the home was a relatively new invention. The first commercial application of the first electric lightbulb was in the 1870s; because of the brightness of […]
How did a massive, ornately carved, reportedly uncomfortable sofa – shaped like a gondola with arms of carved walnut supporting a pair of winged sphinx figures – get to a remote farm in Buffelspoort, Rustenburg District of South Africa? This is a short story about how the most out of place objects are usually found […]
HT sends me a photo of a sterling silver tulip-shaped engraved vase, won by her great-grandfather for ‘Best Dahlias’ in the 1904 Santa Barbara Flower Show. HT’s great-grandfather was quite adept at winning flower shows, as he was a Master Gardener trained in the fine mansion gardens of England. Relocating, he lived and worked in […]
GJ found two “blob top” straight-sided, shorter-necked low-shouldered amber/brown 23-ounce glass bottles wedged between the ceiling joists in his 1890s house below APS. They were each slightly different and covered with 134 years of dust gathered in their final horizontal resting place amid the lathe and plaster. GJ had been installing a new ceiling fan […]
In HT’s great grandfather’s day, he farmed citrus and avocados on his ranch on Shepard’s Mesa in Carpinteria. He was an early 20th century businessman and had a hacienda adobe in mind for the main house at the ranch. He hired artisans from Mexico, and the house was built with bedrooms opening to a center […]
When I opened that antique dresser drawer, a stiff, corpse-like doll stared up at 12-year-old me. I reeled back in horror, and I have never liked dolls from that day. So as fate would have it, I have an online reputation as a doll expert. A case in point is a photo sent to me […]
This article is the brainchild of a reader who has a wonderful California ceramic collection; he sent me two of his Beatrice Woods (BEATO) bowls that entered his collection and I convinced him to “buy the best” and leave the rest. I polled ten of my favorite clients for their buying or selling regrets regarding […]
In a little Midwestern red brick two-bedroom house in 1960s Deerfield, Illinois, there came a burly gentleman who didn’t speak English. He had a four-foot-long walrus under his massive ruddy arm with a blue bow around its neck. That stranger was my mom’s cousin from Germany, and the walrus was a Steiff, a famous German […]
