GUEST: This was my grandmother's vase. My mother got it when my grandmother died, and then when my mom passed away, I got it.
APPRAISER: You said you had to talk to your brothers and sisters about this?
GUEST: Well, it was not really a discussion. It was kind of the ugly duckling. Nobody really wanted it. I loved it, I think it's beautiful, so...
APPRAISER: You got the booby prize.
GUEST: Yeah, more or less. I don't think it's a booby prize, though. I think it's beautiful.
APPRAISER: Well, it is beautiful, certainly to me it is, and there's a great story behind it as well. The vase was made actually in New York.
GUEST: It was?
APPRAISER: It was made sometime between 1898 and about 1910. It was made out in the Hamptons by Theophilus A. Brouwer. And Brouwer was an odd guy. He was a renaissance man. He was an architect, he was a painter, he made reinforced cement lawn figurines, he built his own house with reinforced cement, but the main thing he's remembered for is his entry into the ceramic arts world. And art pottery was big around the turn of the century, and Brouwer was one of the major forces in a very small way. He developed this thing called fire painting, and if you look on the bottom of your piece, it's not signed by Brouwer, but it says "Flame," and that's a shape number-- I'm not sure exactly what it denotes aside from the shape of the piece.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Maybe it's the 65th piece he tried with this technique. And it shows two flames.
GUEST: I saw that and I actually tried to research that over the years and I've never been able to come up with anything.
APPRAISER: Well, he called it flame painting because he would get a vase that would be white, and he'd grab it with a pair of tongs and dip it into a solution and then go into an open flame and hold the vase in front of the open flame and let the flames lick over the surface of the piece. And if you see this, you can see where the flames have played on the surface of the pot, okay? And orange-- he put it back in, he'd know how long to hold it there. Green-- he put it back in another time, he'd wait again. He can control the process of letting the flames influence the color of the glazing on his pots. So not only was he able to control the color itself, but certainly the intermodulation of various colors imparted by the fire onto the raw glaze. So that's a great thing, and he's known for his flame painting. But more importantly about this piece, because all of his flame pieces have these colors we're talking about, but these stripes running down the side, I've never seen that before, and I've probably seen a couple hundred pieces of Brouwer's work. His work is in many of the famous museums in America, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So he's a big deal, and this is, aside from being a beautiful example of the work of a master from the Arts and Crafts period, it's also an unusual example to have this technique so controlled in the face of the fire. There is a small chip on the rim, but it really doesn't matter much. It's a fairly lightweight biscuit, so it does tend to damage.
GUEST: That's why I don't put anything in it. I've never put anything in it, water or flowers or anything.
APPRAISER: That's wise of you. I would say at auction today, worth somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000.
GUEST: Seriously? Wow, okay. Not so ugly after all, is it? I'm a Long Island girl, so knowing it's local and is staying local is pretty cool.
