GUEST: My husband and I bought it about 30 years ago up in Seattle. We were up there on business. We saw it at an estate place and we liked it. We thought it was beautiful. We're just sort of getting into antiques at that time, and so we bought it. We thought it was really pretty, but we didn't know exactly what it was. It said Tiffany on the bottom, but we weren't sure it was Tiffany because it was so big, and it could have been a fake or something like that.
APPRAISER: Tiffany was pretty much the first to do beautiful Art Nouveau iridescent glass.
GUEST: Yeah, I've heard that, yeah.
APPRAISER: He was like the dean of American glass. Here you have a beautiful vase. It's a favrile vase, iridescent. The design, as you see it, the color was pulled off hot and then pulled down with tools while it was being blown. So all the design you see going down--the feathering and the patterns, were all done when the glass was molten. It almost looks like there's a letter on the side here, but what it is probably just a mark from when the hot glass was pulled with the tools, a lot of times it leaves a mark and it's just a by product of the way the glass was made. It's a beautiful design; it's typical Art Nouveau. The mark we see on the piece on the bottom-- and it's hard to see because there's a green felt through it--and it says "Louis" and then "Tiffany". You can't see the "C" and there doesn't seem to be anything else on the mark. Now, this type of glass, when the prices got high, were certainly faked. And you said you had some concerns.
GUEST: That's right.
APPRAISER: Well, let me assure you, first of all, that the piece is Tiffany.
GUEST: Oh, good.
APPRAISER: So, the time frame of this is going to be the very, very early 1900s. Do you remember how much you paid for the piece when you bought it years ago?
GUEST: I think, maybe--we paid quite a bit of money--maybe it was like $250 or something.
APPRAISER: I would say in a retail store in New York, you could easily expect a price of $8,000 to $10,000 on the vase.
GUEST: Wow. Wow, okay.
