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.