Portrait of a Songbird

QUESTION:  I have this bust of a woman and was wondering if you can tell me anything about it. It's approximately ten inches high and appears to be made of marble. The name “Patti” appears under the bust.

ANSWER: Your bust isn’t made of marble but is a fine example of Parian Ware, a bisque-type porcelain invented to simulate marble so that upper middle class 19th-century homeowners could decorate their homes with beautiful things much like the wealthy.  The woman depicted in this late 19th-century bust is the renowned opera singer Adelina Patti.

First, let’s take a look at the bust’s material. Unlike marble, which is a stone, Parian is actually a form of ceramics made of white clay and feldspar. Minton, one of England’s leading ceramics makers, named it in 1845 for the Greek island of Paros, renowned for its fine-textured, white marble of the same name. Copeland, another leading ceramics manufacturer, called their version Statuary Porcelian. Parian’s advantage over marble was that it could be prepared as a liquid and poured into molds, cutting production costs and making it cheaper to buy.

Used mostly for figurines and busts, Parian at first simulated famous classic sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome. But later on, after it caught on, artists sculpted busts of famous persons of the times. This bust of Adelina Patti is one of hundreds produced during the peak of Parian’s popularity.

Although eight primary English manufacturers produced Parian, Minton and Copeland were the largest and produced some of the finest examples.

Born on February 10, 1843 in Madrid, Spain, the last child of Italian tenor Salvatore Patti and soprano Caterina Barilli, Adelina Juana Maria Patti was a famous 19th-century opera singer. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914. Along with two other songbirds, Jenny Lind and Thérèse Tietjens, Patti remains one of the most famous sopranos in history because of the purity of her lyrical voice. The composer Giuseppe Verdi, writing in 1877, described her as being the finest singer who had ever lived.

She made her operatic debut at age 16 on November 24, 1859 in the title role of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at the Academy of Music in New York. When she was   18, she appeared at London’s Covent Garden Opera House in the role of Amina in Bellini's La sonnambula. She had such success at Covent Garden that she purchased  a house in Clapham and, using London as a base, went on to conquer the famous opera houses of Europe.

In 1862, during an American tour, she sang John Howard Payne's “Home, Sweet Home” at the White House for President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Lincoln. Moved to tears, the Lincolns requested an encore of the song in honor of their dead son Willie. Patti later performed it many times as a encore at the end of her concerts.

Patti had a tremendously successful career. She sang not only in England and the United States, but also in Europe, Russia, and South America, receiving critical acclaim wherever she went.

Patti was a true diva. She demanded to be paid $5000 a night in gold, before the performance. Her contracts stipulated that she receive top billing and that her name be  printed larger than anyone else in the cast.

She last sang in public in October 1914, taking part in a Red Cross concert at London's Royal Albert Hall that had been organized to aid victims of World War I. She lived long enough to see the war end, dying on September 27, 1919 of natural causes at Craig-y-Nos Castle, her private residence in Wales. In her will, she requested that she be buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to be close to her father and favorite composer Rossini.

When she was a child, her parents moved the family to New York City where Patti grew up in the Wakefield section of the Bronx. Patti sang professionally from childhood, and developed into a coloratura soprano with perfectly equalized vocal registers and a surprisingly warm, satiny tone. Patti learned how to sing and gained understanding of voice technique from her brother-in-law Maurice Strakosch, who was a musician and impresario.

For more information on Parian Ware, read my article in The Antiques Almanac.

Determing Value

This is the 200th post of this blog. And being so, I thought I’d break away from my usual question and answer format and discuss a topic for which I receive lots of questions—value. I routinely tell everyone that I don’t do valuations. I do that because value is one of the hardest things to determine without lots of expert information. That’s why certified appraisers are in such high demand. But they’re expensive, so most people seek free value advice.

Value of any kind is subjective. It depends on several things—age, rarity, authenticity, trendiness, and historical association. Just because an item is old doesn’t make it valuable. Take glass from ancient Rome. At over two 2,000 years old, you’d think it would be worth a fortune. But the truth is there’s so much of it around that it isn’t worth as much as you’d think.

Throughout history, people had as much junk as we have today. But they didn’t value things in quite the same way as we do today. For ordinary people, old furniture was just old furniture. Old dishes were often mismatched. Let’s face it, they didn’t have “Antiques Roadshow” to make them think that just about everything was valuable.

To determine an item’s value, you first have to determine its age. The type of wood used in furniture, particularly the secondary woods used for the inside of drawers, is an important clue of age. If you see a  circular saw pattern in the wood on a piece of furniture, you know it was made after 1840.

Not everything rare is valuable either. An old book by an unknown author might be extremely rare. But to be valuable, someone must want to buy it. Nevertheless, rarity is a key determinant of value. Start by considering how rare an item was when it first appeared on the market.

Think in terms of different levels of production. At the bottom are mass-produced items made of ordinary and usually cheaper materials. At the top are unique items made of the finest materials. Generally, if an item was rare and valuable when it was made, it'll be even more rare and valuable today. Previously expensive objects will still be expensive today.

When an antique or collectible is in demand by collectors, it’s price can skyrocket. And when prices climb, fakes and forgeries abound. Some forgers use as much skill producing fakes as if they were making an original. Fraudulent antiques lie in wait for the uninformed. A good example is the myriad of fake Chippendale furniture coming out of Indonesia.

Perfectly round wood in a piece of furniture, for example, is a tell-tale sign of a forgery, because wood becomes distorted with age. Look carefully at ceramics to see if someone painted the decoration on top of the glaze after the firing.

When it comes to collecting antiques, condition is prime. Did you know that the patina on fine furniture----produced before 1830—is one of its most important features, and too much cleaning and restoration can ruin it? Did you know, for example, that the value of a rare book can drop by more than 100 percent if it doesn't have its dust jacket?

Another thing that influences value is how typical an item is. Collectors are always looking for representative examples of a given period, craft or style. When an item sparks a collecting trend, prices always go up.

Finally, an object’s association with someone famous automatically increases its value. That’s because more collectors want to own it. And that’s the bottom line with value. The more people who want to own an object, the more its worth. And an item is only worth what the last person paid for it.

I hope you find this post as useful as the previous 199. I’ve enjoyed writing this blog and plan to continue bringing you insightful information about antiques and collectibles. For more in-depth articles, please visit The Antique Almanac, my new monthly E-zine on antiques and collectibles. You’ll never know what you’ll learn next.

That's a Crock!

QUESTION: Some time ago I purchased an old crock at an antique show in my area. I believe it holds two gallons and has two hearts and the number “2" painted in blue on the front. The name Sarah Good is incised above the hearts. Can you tell me how old this crock is and what is the significance of the heart design?

ANSWER: Heart decoration was somewhat rare among crocks. Though your crock has a name incised in it isn’t unusual,  that the name is female is. This indicates that this crock may have been a wedding gift, specially made for Sarah Good. After all, a crock in the early to mid-19th century was a piece of kitchen equipment much as a set of canisters is today.

Potters made crocks of American stoneware, which they covered in an alkaline or salt glaze and often decorated using cobalt oxide to produce bright blue designs. Though people often use the term "crock" to describe this type of pottery, the word "crock" wasn’t used at the time these vessels were popular.

Stoneware is a type of pottery that’s  fired to about 1200°C to 1315°C. While it originated in the Rhineland area of Germany in the 15tth century, it became the dominant piece of houseware in America between 1780 and 1890. People relied on American Stoneware as not only a durable, decorative piece of houseware but as a safer alternative to lead-glazed earthenware. The invention of refrigeration caused its decline.

Americans began producing salt-glazed stoneware circa 1720 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Yorktown, Virginia. By the 1770s, the art of salt-glazed stoneware production had spread to many centers throughout the United States, most notably Manhattan, New York. The Remmey and Crolius families of potters would, by the turn of the 19th century, set the standard for expertly crafted and beautiful stoneware. By 1820, potters in nearly every American city produced stoneware, with those from Baltimore, Maryland, standing out for their excellent craftsmanship.

While salt-glazing is the typical glaze technique seen on American Stoneware, potters employed other glazing methods. They often dipped vessels in Albany Slip, a mixture made from a clay peculiar to the Upper Hudson Region of New York, and when fired, produced a dark brown glaze. They sometimes used this slip as a glaze to coat the inside surface of salt-glazed ware.

While decorated ware was usually adorned using cobalt oxide, American Stoneware potters used other decorative techniques. Incising, a method in which a design of flowering plants, birds, or some other decoration was cut into the leather-hard clay using a stylus, produced detailed, recessed images on the vessels. Potters usually highlighted these in cobalt. They also impressed designs into the leather-hard clay using wooden stamps. Potters occasionally substituted manganese or iron oxide for cobalt oxide to produce brown, instead of blue, decorations on their pieces.

In the last half of the 19th century, potters in New England and New York state began producing stoneware with elaborate figural designs such as deer, dogs, birds, houses, people, historical scenes and other fanciful motifs including elephants and "bathing beauties."

Most stoneware jugs had some sort of decoration on them which covered only a small area. Unlike other pottery, they weren’t decorated all over. Birds and flowers were commonly painted using cobalt-oxide glaze or incised into the surface with a stylus.

More elaborate designs featured chickens standing by a water trough or sprigs of greenery artfully handpainted with cobalt slip. Sometimes the location of the potter appeared on the side of the jar or on its base.

A crock’s decoration can often be a clue to where it was made. A two-gallon jug with a cobalt design of a sailing ship with flag atop the middle of three fasts, a light-house to the right and a group of rocks to te left, indicates that it most likely came from New England.

Potters signed a good bit of their work using their maker’s mark or sometimes incised their signatures in the surface of the jar. Many pieces can be attributed to particular makers based on the cobalt decoration, clay body, form, and such. They marked the gallon capacity of the vessels using numeral stamps or incised or cobalt oxide numbers or hash marks applied freehand.

For the last several years, stoneware prices have been climbing ever higher, especially for the high-end wares. Most stoneware crocks sell for four to six figures, depending on their maker and condition.

Collectors continue to pay premium prices for stoneware decorated with elaborate and unique motifs. Attributed to David Parr Sr. of Baltimore, a circa-1830 six-gallon jar with a cobalt design of a flower basket that covered the entire front of the vessel sold for $13,750 at auction. The back of the jar featured a flowering plant rising' from a mound of earth. The vessel had rim and base chips, as well as several cracks and still sold for a high amount.

The same auction contained a one-gallon stoneware jug showing a house, tree and fence which sold for $10,175. Stamped J. & E. Norton/Bennington, Vermont, buyers liked this circa-1855 jug not only for its cobalt decoration, but also for its small size. Salt-glazed pieces sell for especially high prices. A salt-glazed water cooler brought $10,500 at auction.

More on Organizing Your Collections

You’ve figured out a numbering system and assigned numbers to the items in your collection. The next step is to apply them to your objects. Whichever technique you used depends on the surface of the object. The labels must be removable in case you sell an item from the collection, but they must also be durable and long-lasting. Choose a place for the label on the bottom or back of objects, being careful not to obliterate any trademarks, serial numbers, patent dates, or maker's signatures. Use a thin pointed Sharpie marker to print the numbers on the labels. Removable labels work the best.

Paper items can be labeled with a soft pencil, never with ink or a rubber stamp. Apply the label in an inconspicuous place, preferably on the back, always keeping in mind that it may have to be removed. Place the label on a sturdy portion of the paper, not so close to the edge that the paper will tear if the number is erased.

For such textiles as rugs, quilts, samplers, wall hangings, and clothing, use small fabric labels numbered with a laundry pen or fine ballpoint pen. Always test the pen first on a piece of scrap label to make sure that the ink does not bleed or smear. Attach the label to the fabric with only one or two stitches at each corner so that the label can easily be removed without damaging the fabric. Although self-adhesive labels or iron-on tape may seem quick and easy, they are not recommended because they fall off in time. They sometimes permanently discolor the object or leave a residue that can damage it.

If you recorded your collection on cards or in a looseleaf notebook, you can break it down into individual classifications for filing purposes. You may wish to even break down those classifications further.  Some specialties may not require such complete listings, and some individual headings may need to be expanded. For example, if the specialty is Eastlake-inspired furniture, subheadings can be added in the furniture category to identify makers or types of furniture. In the case of bottles, for example, specify the type of glass, blown or molded, the color and shape, and the type of bottle—whiskey bottle, flask, bitters bottle, or house-hold bottle. The contents of your collection and your planned future acquisitions will determine the headings you choose.

Using a digital camera or camera-equipped smartphone, you may wish to add photos of the items in your collection to your listings or database. Photograph the items individually. If you’re working with small objects, consider buying or making a lightbox—a box with white paper on three sides and bottom—in which you can photograph them. Save the originals as is, but make copies of all the photos first and rename them using the catalog number you’ve assigned to that object.

Most growing collections represent substantial investments of time and effort as well as money. Besides its obvious uses for insurance claims, a carefully kept catalog is valuable to those who may buy or inherit your collection. Cataloging is also a way of becoming intimately acquainted with all the objects in your collection, identifying the collection's strengths and weaknesses, and  taking the time to enjoy it thoroughly.

Romance on the Dining Table

QUESTION: I have some dishes that belonged to my grandmother. I believe they’re over 100 years old. Each has a scene in the center in light blue on a white background. From research I’ve done, I know they’re called Staffordshire, but I still haven’t been able to find much about them. Could you tell me something about them, especially the decorative scenes?

ANSWER: Wedgwood & Co., Unicorn & Pinnox,Works, Staffordshire Potteries, not to be confused with Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, made your dishes. They specialized in making earthenware and stoneware pieces for everyday table use from 1860 to1965. Your particular dishes date somewhere from 1860 to 1890. 

Many people think Staffordshire is a company, but it’s actually a geographical region encompassing 12 shires in England. Many English potters established themselves there because they found the clays  superior to those found elsewhere in England. In fact, potters have been at work there since the days of the Roman occupation.

In the late 18th century there were as many as 80 different manufacturers in the ;Staffordshire district. By 1802, the number had increased to 149. No single company is responsible for manufacturing Staffordshire dishes. Each potter produced his own wares employing a different border from the others.   These border could have medallions, scrolls, lace, shells, flowers, or trees.

Staffordshire potters made their wares from white earthenware pottery found nearby. Workers applied decoration using a method called transfer printing, developed around 1755. They accomplished this inexpensive method by engraving a design onto a copper plate, which they then inked with special ceramic paint and applied to thin paper. Pressing the paper onto the surface left ink behind.

After inking each piece, another worker placed the object into a low-temperature kiln to fix the pattern. The printing could be done either under or over the glaze on a ceramic piece, but since the ink tended to wear off on overprinted pieces, potteries switched to glazing the inked surface after the initial firing.

Scenic views of the Orient and of romantic European destinations with castles and towns became popular. The inspiration for these came from classical literature which was popular at the time. The most valuable plates,. however, are those with American scenes, produced between1800 and 1848. Enterprising English potters arranged with artists traveling in America to sketch the sites for their ware. Leading Staffordshire potters like Adams, Clews, Meigh, Ridgway, Stevens, and Wood, plus those from  hundreds of small companies created American views.

The firms manufacturing these wares included Ridgway, Johnson Brothers, Spode and Wedgwood along with many others. Josiah Wedgwood eventually used the transfer process to decorate his familiar ivory Creamware.

Stamps on the back of each piece often indicated the pattern with or without the maker's trademark. Since several companies employed the same patterns, identifying some pieces can be difficult. At first potters used deep cobalt blue and white designs to simulate wares made in China. These remain sentimental favorites in the United States and England. As technology improved, the shade lightened. By 1850, potteries began using other colors, such as pink, red, black, green, brown and purple.

Most transferware patterns sought by collectors today are two-tone. Blue and white, red and white, and brown and white are the most common combinations. Transferware has become increasingly pricey in the last 10 years, mostly due to articles about using it for decoration to liven up today’s bland home interiors. 

Drinking With Both Hands

QUESTION: I recently purchased a lovely handleless cup and saucer at an antique show. The dealer couldn’t tell me much about it except that it’s called a tea bowl. It has a beautiful landscape scene on it in a sort of lavender color. What can you tell me about this piece?

ANSWER: What you have is indeed a transferware tea bowl, made in the Staffordshire area of England in the early to mid-19th century.

Before the development of the handled teacup, the British upper classes drank their tea from expensive imported Chinese porcelain tea bowls and saucers. Owning a porcelain cup became a mark of high social status. In fact, many members of British nobility posed for portraits holding their favorite cup and saucer. The teacup or bowl was so important that most people usually carried their own to parties in special leather and satin carrying cases.

The cup, as it's known today, with a handle on the side, wasn't introduced until the 18th century.
Prior to that, hostesses and servants poured tea into a cup with no handles. The person drinking the hot tea then poured it, in small amounts, into a deep saucer and sipped from the saucer. Pouring a small amount into the saucer allowed it to cool just the bit. Also, on cold winter days, the handless tea bowl acted as a hand warmer.

It wasn’t until Josiah Wedgwood and Josiah Spode perfected the mass production of earthenware and porcelain did handled teacups become popular.

At about the same time, English pottery makers in the Staffordshire region introduced a new decorative method, known as  "decalcomania," in which workers applied printed decals or transfers onto  pottery and porcelain wares. This enabled potteries to produce cups and saucers carrying social, political,  and advertising slogans.

The process starts with an engraved copper plate similar to those used for making paper engravings.  The engraver traced the outline onto thin tissue paper and then reproduced it on a sheet of copper using homemade carbon paper. He engraved over this outline with a V-shaped groove and added the details and areas of shading using lines or dots. The idea of using dots, or stipple punching, rather than lines came later in the 18th century. The engraver found the right depth by trial and error, so he took a first print or proof before he reworked the lines and dots to deepen them if necessary. The deeper the engraving, the deeper the deposits of color, thus the darker the result. Engravers created early designs with lines and in uniform dark blue, but as the technique of engraving improved so engravers achieved different tonal qualities and printed in pink, green, lavender, brown, and black inks.

Workers, using inked copper plates would print the pattern onto tissue paper, which then transferred the wet ink to the white ceramic surface. They then fired the ceramic piece in a low temperature kiln to fix the pattern. This could be done over or under the glaze, but the underprinting method was more durable. The process produced fine lines similar to the engraved prints in old books. Before transfer printing, pottery workers handpainted the ceramics, a laborious and costly process.

During the printing process, the printer kept the plate warm by placing it on a circular iron plate or backstone. He then applied the ink to the copper plate, making sure to rub the ink into every dot and line. After scraping off the surplus color, he removed any film of color by rubbing the surface with a corduroy-faced pad. When the  copper plate was clean, he laid the tissue paper coated with a mixture of soft soap and water and passed it through the press's rollers. He then passed the printed image, now in reverse—unlike regular engravings that begin in reverse and appear correct on printing—on to the transfer team, consisting of the transferrer, apprentice, and cutter.

The cutter removed the excess paper leaving only the design pieces. The transferrer laid these pieces, colored by cobalt oxide, on to the ware after its first or biscuit firing, then dipped it in glaze and refired it. A design with an overall pattern would have the center applied first and the border around the rim afterwards. The tackiness of the oily print held it in place while the apprentice rubbed it down vigorously with a stiff-bristled brush using a little soft soap as lubricant.

The apprentice then soaked the earthenware in a tub of water to soften the paper, which he removed by sponging, the oil-based color being unaffected by the water. After drying, an assistant placed the ware into the hardening kiln to fire at 1,250-1,290 F. to remove the oils and secure the color. Afterwards, another worker glazed the piece and placed it into the kiln to be   refired at 1,940-2,010° F.

Engraving for transfer printing reached its peak by 1816. And by 1805, lighter shades of royal blue as well as ultramarine came into use. Though each factory developed its own potting and decorative techniques, considerable copying took place between factories. In addition, each factory experimented with different styles and products changed dramatically over a short time.
Not only did the paste and tone of the underglaze blue vary from factory to factory, but they also varied according to the stage of each factory's development.

To complicate matters, makers constantly introduced new patterns, while shapes of plates, dishes, tureens varied from time to time according to the prevailing trends. When the Chinese-inspired designs lost favor, manufacturers replaced them with European scenes, which they copied from engravings in books. Floral borders resembled each other in general appearance, although most differed in detail.

Today, transfer tea bowls are going for astronomical prices. One is excellent condition, with a perfectly matched design, can fetch upwards of $150-200 in an antique show or shop.

Water, Water Everywhere

QUESTION: I discovered this unique water bottle at a local antiques co-op. While most antique water decanters are solid cut or pressed glass, this one comes apart into two pieces. A metal ring, with a rubber gasket to make the seal tight, screws onto the base. The mark on the bottom edge of the top section reads: Perfection Bottle Co., Wilkes-Barre, PA Pat March 30-97. What can you tell me about this type of water bottle?

ANSWER: You, indeed, have found a unique water bottle. Though a revolutionary idea, this type of water bottle appeared in stores for only a few years.

From the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, water bottles were standard items in many American Victorian households. They appeared on dinner tables either alone or with matching glasses and in bedrooms often with a glass that set upside down over the top of the bottle. They also could be found on the nightstands in hotel rooms and steamship cabins, and on tables in railroad lounge cars.

At first, manufacturers made them of elegant cut glass, but that was too expensive for the average person. Some turned to using pressed glass in a variety of patterns which lowered their cost.

However, cleaning these crystal beauties posed a serious problem with hygiene. The bottle’s narrow neck made it hard to get a brush down into it, making it almost impossible to clean the inside surface of the bottle’s bulbous interior. But that changed in 1896 when William B. Fenn came up with the idea of a separating water bottle—one with pieces that could unscrew for easy cleaning. On March 30 of the following year, he applied for and received a patent for it.

Fenn’s separating water bottle had an ingenious design. He made the neck and base two separate pieces, with the bottom edge of the neck fitting inside the top rim of the base. A rubber gasket formed a waterproof seal between the two parts and a metal ring screwed over the joint to lock the pieces in place.

Even though Fenn used glass for his original design, he stipulated in his patent that any material, including ceramics and porcelain, could be used for the bottle, itself, and any metal could be used for the joining ring as long it wouldn’t corrode.

It took nearly three years for Fenn's" bottle to be available to the public.,Priced at $4.50 each when they first came on the market in 1900, they were well beyond the means of the average person. Realizing he had to do something to increase sales, Fenn redesigned the pattern on the bottle so that it could be pressed instead of cut. Suddenly, the price per bottle dropped to 50 cents per bottle, or 34 cents each for a dozen, making the Fenn water bottle affordable for everyone.

Fenn’s invention was so successful that he decided to expand production. By October,1902, consumers could purchase a decanter and stopper in four sizes—half pint, and one, two and three-pint versions. And during 1903; He expanded the line further to include other glass containers, such as   syrup pitchers and cruets, as well as bitters, cologne, and barber bottles, each with a different pattern.

The separating water bottle came in three models—the Royal, with a delicate design imitating cut crystal, the Imperial, also sold in two and three-pint capacities but without a pattern, the Optic, with a succession of single, convex protruding, vertical panels with rounded tops and bottoms, and the Colonial, featuring nine rounded panels with flat bottoms around the base. Each came in two and three-pint sizes, except the Colonial which also came in a half-gallon size.

In 1903, the Perfection Water Bottle Co. and the Sterling Glass Co. combined to create the Perfection Glass.Co. of Washington, Pennsylvania, with William Fenn as one of the initial investors. But the new company was only to last until 1907 when it closed its doors for lack of sales.

Taking the Mystery Out of Identifying Antiques

QUESTION: I have what I believe to be an English ceramic plate with a mark that looks like a diamond with a bunch of letters and numbers in it. Can you tell me what that means?

ANSWER: The stamp on the back of your plate is known as a mark. Manufacturers of English pottery used this particular design between 1842 and 1883. The letters and numbers indicate the dates of the plate’s design registration with the British patent office. You can easily decipher this alpha-numeric code by checking the chart found on the Phoenix Masonry Web site or in Kovels' New Dictionary of Marks--Pottery & Porcelain: 1850 to the Present by Ralph and Terry Kovel (Crown Publishers, New York).

Pottery makers replaced this diamond-shaped registry mark with a sequential numbering system prefaced by the abbreviation Rd. No.  in 1884. Over the years, they modified the arrangement of the numbers several times, so it can be confusing. If you need specific information, you can contact the British Designs Registry Patent Office for dates registered in and after 1909 and the British Public Record Office for dates registered prior to 1909.

Sometimes, pottery and porcelain makers used word indications that spelled out the date. If the mark shows the country of origin, this means the piece dates after 1891, according to the U.S.  McKinley Tariff Law.

Often manufacturers worldwide employed words to describe their wares. These usually had start and end dates, making it easy to figure out the approximate date of a piece. For instance, the term "Nippon,” the Japanese name for Japan, indicates that piece of Japanese porcelain dates from 1891 to 1921while "Made in Occupied Japan" shows that the piece dates from  1945 to 1952. "Semi-vitreous" means the piece appeared on the market after 1901 while "bone china" indicates that the piece dates generally from the 20th century.  The phrase "oven-proof' appeared on pottery and china after 1933, but "dishwasher proof ” didn’t appear until after 1955. Sometimes a location, such as "East Germany" can indicate a time period, which in this case extends from 1949 to1990.

If a piece of pottery or porcelain has a mark showing a design and/or maker’s name, this information may also help to date it. You’ll find loads of resources, both in print and online, to help you identify early English, European, and Asian pottery and porcelain marks.

In the United States, makers stamped patent numbers on the backs and bottoms of their pottery pieces. A patent number represents the very earliest an article could have been produced. For example, a patent number of 16,388 indicates the piece appeared after Jan. 1, 1857 but prior to Jan. 1, 1858. Therefore, it dates from 1857, the year of its patent registration. Should you discover several sequential patent number sets on one piece, you should look up the final set on a patent date chart to date the piece.

Marks on furniture, glass, and silver are another story. When a maker uses his name or logo, you may have enough information to track the date of manufacture. Often during the course of the run of a piece, the maker will use different names. This is true of Tiffany glass. On some pieces, Tiffany signed, that is incised, his name “Louis C. Tiffany.” On later pieces, “Tiffany Studios” appears on the piece, and yet others show no mark at all.

Early furniture makers often scratched their name on the bottom of a piece, such as under the seat of a chair. But by the early 20th century, almost all manufacturers used labels affixed to the backs or bottoms of their pieces. If a piece of furniture has a label, it surely indicates that the piece is modern. Gustav Stickley employed a red decal featuring his logo, a joiner's compass, from 1902 to 1903 as compared to the revised decals Stickley used between 1903 and 1912.