First let me start by saying I am new to this forum and was referred here by a dealer in the UK in an attempt to identify a piece of glass I am researching. It turns out that I registered here several years ago, but forgot about the site and never used it until this week. It is a fabulous resource and I am enjoying a new found wealth of information on glass.... Probably my greatest collecting love.... but surely not my only one!!
That being said, here is my story!!
I am a collector in the US, and an avid ebay fanatic.... Have been for years. In Sept of last year I purchased a pair of vases on ebay for very good price that were sold as "Mid Century Murano". I will also mention at this point that I also collect some Austro-Hungarian and Czech glass. The vases are a very pleasing form, and contain a large amount of Silver foil inclusions. Upon receiving them I was thrilled with the quality and feel of the vases but knew they were not Mid Century Italian. I actually wondered if they were Italian at all, but the silver foil inclusions in the glass continued to make me lean that direction. The condition and underfoot wear was such that I thought they could actually be newer, but loved them and we set them in the living room on display.
After several months of living with them, I saw an auction on ebay that referenced a Loetz decor called Argentan by the Master Leopold Bauer. The auction was for a vase that was definitely not Loetz, but the resemblance of the image on Loetz.com to my vases was a little unusual. There was only one image at the Loetz website, no closeups, and it was a different color than my pair. My foil inclusions were in some cases quite a bit larger than the pic on the Loetz website, so I kept enjoying them and did not really give it a second thought. I felt they were possibly a nice knock off of the early Loetz decor and thought the issue was settled.
About a month ago there was an auction on ebay for a piece of Argentan, and it had a large number of pictures and closeups. It was the first piece of Argentan that I had ever seen on ebay. I studied the images closely and decided that there were striking similarities that were far too great to not research it further. I contacted several well respected authorities that have helped me with Austro-Hungarian glass attributions in the past and much to my surprise, it turns out that I have a quite large, quite rare, and stunning pair of Loetz vases in a very rare decor by Leopold Bauer. They are unusually large for the decor, being just over 9 inches tall and 4.5 inches wide at the waist. To say the least, they are worth substantially more than I paid for them.
I now know how people on the Antiques Roadshow feel when they are given a surprise appraisal!!
I can not tell you the number of hours I have spent at the Loetz.com website researching glass, and never really noticed the decor or paid attention to it in the past, as I had never seen a piece of it online, or anywhere else. It still amazes me that with all I know about glass, the uncountable hours of research I do, and all of the time I put into glass collecting, I found a treasure..... and it had been sitting in front of my face for over 6 months before I "discovered" what it was.
I wanted to share this story because I know, as collectors, we all dream of these types of things happening to us. It amazes me that they can, and still do happen in today's world.....
It turns out the vases were a wedding gift to a woman in the 1950's in Canada, and they had been sitting in a suitcase in a closet for many years......
The pics attached are of the vases!!
Topic: A Great Find - A Collecting Story - A Glass Collectors Dream Come True!! (Read 1436 times)
