GUEST: I was at a very good estate sale, and I had my hands full of good items, but when I saw this in the curio cabinet, I put everything down, went running towards it. I almost missed it, and I was hoping it was a Goldscheider figurine. I'd seen them before and I knew this was the large one, not with just one lady, the couple, and I thought, this is nice.
APPRAISER: Well, your hopes are correct, it is by the Goldscheider Company, and this was a family company of potters and porcelain makers who worked in Vienna in Austria, from the late 19th century until about the onset of World War II. And much of their distinctive work is figures of this type-- large, impressive, colorful, made between the two wars, mostly in the '20s and into the '30s. And I would certainly date this to the late 1920s. Now, it's exquisitely painted. Look at her belt here, painted with these geometric designs, and this Art Deco cluster of flowers. Everything about it is distinctively of the period, distinctively Viennese, and distinctively Goldscheider. Now if we look beyond the color scheme and the standards of painting, look at the figures. You've got this flapper, kind of embraced by this Italian figure against the prow of a Venetian gondola. The whole thing is very exotic, something exciting, something romantic. And Goldscheider just captured that perfectly. The quality of the painting, the modeling, continues throughout the figure. So, there is a mark on the base that says, faintly, Goldscheider. But we really don't need to look at the mark of the object. Everything else about it says it really could not be anything but Goldscheider. The thing about Goldscheider, once we've identified it as such, they did remake things later in the period. After World War II, and up until quite recently, Goldscheider figures were reproduced, so we have to ask ourselves: is it a period one or is it a reproduction?
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: And again, all we need do is look at the quality of the work. Couldn't really be anything but a pre-World War II Goldscheider. What did you have to pay for it at that sale?
GUEST: It was in the $160 range, $160 range.
APPRAISER: $160. Mm-hmm. So what were you hoping the value would be?
GUEST: I know some of them do very, very well, some of them do in the $18,000 and $22,000 range, but I just, I really don't know.
APPRAISER: $18,000 to $22,000 is an astronomical sum, I must say, for a Goldscheider figure. There was a time when Goldscheider figures were a little more popular than they are today, but having said that, we felt that a good retail price today would be perhaps as much as $2,500.
GUEST: Okay, thank you.
