Topic: Looking for info on 4 unrelated paperweights

[buddman]

Hello.  I imagine you get these types of questions all the time.  Sorry.  By neighbour died a few months ago and her house is being emptied this weekend by a clearance company.  Her son has told me I can help myself to anything left in the house. There were these 4 paperweights on a shelf and before they get thrown away, I thought I would just check if they were anything worth saving.  The milifiori one looks nice to my uneducated eye.  My neighbour was not a person of any means and didn't have valuable things in the house. She did however travel Italy many many times on holidays and had friends there, so I thought maybe some could be Italian.

The first one is the largest, 7cm tall x 6.2cm wide
The milifiori is 4.2cm high and 5.5cm wide.
The orange swirl is 4.3 x 5.2
and the final blue swirl (which looks cheap to me!) is the largest 6 cm x 7.5

Thanks in advance for any info or advice you can provide.

Buddman

[buddman]

And here are the bases.  The first 3 have polished bases and the last one is sort of unfinished? and is not polished. 

[Lustrousstone]

The blue controlled bubble one is likely Czech and sold under the Jaffe Rose label, the millefiore one is Chinese late 20th C, and the red, yellow and white one is mid-late 20th C Indian. They have little value. The blue one is the most interesting, so we need a base shot please

[buddman]

Thanks for the information and for taking the time to reply. 

Here are some pics of the blue one. The base is concave and has an unpolished pontil.

[chopin-liszt]

  Does the pontil scar have a sharp edge across it? It looks as if it might have been heat treated to remove the sharp edges. That often leaves a neatish round ring about the scar, and I can see something that looks like that in your first base pic.

[Ekimp]

Hi, welcome to the forum Buddman.

the millefiore one is Chinese late 20th C

I don’t know much about weights but isn’t the Chinese millefiori actually an earlier one, pre 1940? I would keep that one.

See seventh one here: https://www.paperweights.com/paperweights/chinese.htm , direct link to the photos of that: https://www.paperweights.com/paperweights/images1/pw1002.jpg

And:
https://www.pwts.co.uk/pages/Chinese%20older%20paperweights.htm

[buddman]

Does the pontil scar have a sharp edge across it? It looks as if it might have been heat treated to remove the sharp edges. That often leaves a neatish round ring about the scar, and I can see something that looks like that in your first base pic.

you might be pushing the limits of my detective skills. The pontil is still rough-ish, and its still clearly "round" - I can run my fingernail all around it an feel its crisp edges, so it doesn't look to have a ring.

Can you access a video link on these forums?  https://i.imgur.com/8YNACJT.mp4

[buddman]

Hi, welcome to the forum Buddman.

I don’t know much about weights but isn’t the Chinese millefiori actually an earlier one, pre 1940? I would keep that one.

See seventh one here: https://www.paperweights.com/paperweights/chinese.htm , direct link to the photos of that: https://www.paperweights.com/paperweights/images1/pw1002.jpg

And:
https://www.pwts.co.uk/pages/Chinese%20older%20paperweights.htm

Thanks for the input :-)

[chopin-liszt]

I can access your video and it shows exactly what I need to see. It's wonderful, thank-you! 
It has not been heat treated, the "ring" around it I thought I saw was created by the illusion created in a 2D photo of the chipped edge of the round bit.
It is just a very neatly snapped off piece.

Perthshire and some other Scottish weights have had the heat treatment used on their scars, and I'm familiar with what those look like.

[Lustrousstone]

Re the Chinese one, the colours are brighter and cane slices are thicker than I would expect for pre 1940 one (middle and later here https://www.pwts.co.uk/pages/Chinese%20older%20paperweights.htm), but even the older ones don't have that much value

The blue one I suspect is somebody's effort at a paperweight lesson, perhaps at Teign Valley Glass form the way the pontil mark is indented