©1999-2015
|
The following article appeared in
WPA
Press, Vol. 5, July 2000
Caveat Emptor As president of the WPA I have recently received a few interesting emails, through our website. One of the emails was from an Egyptian pottery company offering to mass produce any pottery line we send them and to beat the price and quality of anyone reproducing pottery today. Many of these, such as “post 1950’s Roseville”, flooding the market today are shoddy in appearance. Some are not, however. Those of you who came with us on our field trip to Ephraim Pottery last year will attest to seeing beautiful pottery created in minutes by their gifted potters. Were they unscrupulous in their dealings, their pots could easily be mistaken for Grueby, Teco and the like, by the untrained eye — people who have not had the opportunity to see a great deal of this pottery. In the most recent journal of the American Art Pottery Association there is an anecdote about a piece of pottery, pulled from a recent auction because it was discovered to be a fake, but not before the bids topped the five figure mark. Even experienced collectors can be fooled. A second email came from a collector who had recently purchased what she believed to be older Czech pottery. She had seen a reference to John Marvin’s presentation on the WPA website and contacted me asking for information her purchase. I passed her inquiry on to John. John graciously contacted the woman for us. I suggested to John that he write an article on this experience for the WPA Press. Thank you John! Fake? Fraud? or Find? - by John Marvin |
