Glass

Bohemian & Loetz Iridescent Vases

Appraisal: Bohemian & Loetz Iridescent Vases

Transcript

GUEST: We went to a garage sale and I bought this piece for two dollars. And I went to an estate sale and bought that piece there for $20.

APPRAISER: You bought them because you like them? Do you have any idea what they are?

GUEST: I don't know, but we went to... been to several of these Roadshows, and we went to one in Mobile. And we brought some pieces, and you all told us they were Loetz, and so I've liked them ever since, and the color, and so that's why I bought that one. And this was just sitting in a window and the color caught my eye when I was leaving. I turned around and picked it up, saw two dollars, said what the heck.

APPRAISER: Well, Loetz was a company in Austria that did lots of iridescent glass in the early 1900s. Sort of, you know, the European version of a lot of what Tiffany was doing in the States. Let's start with the green one first. You thought it was Loetz from the color.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: This one is actually Bohemian, and the timeframe of this is probably a little later; it's probably 1910, 1920. A little later than Loetz would have done a lot of these things. What's nice about this is most glass is blown from the bottom. This one, the pontil is actually on the top. So the blow stick was on the top, and they blew it, and then when they were done, they cut it off and they polished the top rim. So if you look on the bottom here, you can see there's no mark, it's just pushed in. That's just done while the glass is hot. Now, this one is done by Loetz. It's called Candia Silberiris Astartig. So Candia is the model, Silberires is actually the terminology for this type of iridescence, and the Astartig is the terminology for these little dimples in the glass. Now this one is actually blown from the bottom. So you can see there's a polished section, which is where the blow stick and the pontil would have come off. So the rod would have been on the bottom, rather than the top. Now I will tell you that the Bohemian one, a retail value would be about $150. The one you paid less for, the Loetz piece, has a retail value of about $1,500.

GUEST: Whoo! I'll have some happy grandbabies one day.

Appraiser

Alan Kaplan

Leo Kaplan, Ltd.
New York, NY

APPRAISED VALUE (2012)

$1,650 Retail

Event

Corpus Christi, TX

Theme

Traditional Crafts

Form

Decorative Objects, Vase

Appraiser Speciality

Glass

Material

Glass

Period

20th Century

Update: February 25, 2013

After this appraisal aired, we received viewer feedback questioning Alan Kaplan's description of how art glass is made, specifically in reference to the Bohemian vase. Kaplan has since written to us to clarify his statement: "All the pieces are blown from the top. On many pieces the pontil, or rod, is then attached to the bottom of the vase while it is being worked on. The piece is then taken off the rod and annealed in an oven. The bottom is then polished where the rod comes off. On the vase I was talking about, the rod was never taken off the top until it went into the annealing oven and when cooled, the top was polished."