APPRAISER: You collected these with your wife?
GUEST: Well, yeah, her-- she's an artist, and she had a show, and her partner in the show's mother had an antique shop. And since I helped her frame her painting she gave me this one as a present. That was in the early '70s.
APPRAISER: Wow.
GUEST: I now have a collection of 50 or 60 of these panes, plus two lamps like this, another lamp shade, and I have a couple beer mugs. So it's been a 35-year collection, I guess.
APPRAISER: Lithophanes are fascinating things. They really don't look like much until you light them up.
GUEST: Absolutely.
APRAISER: So I'm going to light up this one closest to me first. Now you can see it in all its glory. The first stage of the process requires carving out layers of wax on a glass plate.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: Which was often illuminated or mirrored from beneath. And there's a considerable amount of artistry and skill in them. And throughout Europe they made them beginning-- no one's entirely sure when they started-- but we tend to think it's the late 1820s. The one I'm illuminating here has a mark on it from the Meissen factory in Meissen in Germany, so they were made at the highest levels of porcelain making. Although most of the factories that made them were in nearby Dresden or throughout other parts of Europe, and made at a lower standard than the Meissen factory. They did make large quantities of them. Once you'd made a mold, you could kind of press them out and away you go. We often see them like this with kind of romantic Victorian scenes because many of them were made in the mid-Victorian years-- 1860 to about 1880 or '90. The lamp, I think, is a little more unusual than most. The majority of lithophanes are simple panels, usually very thin, up to a quarter-inch thick, but typically closer to an eighth of an inch thick. So very fragile and brittle, but you don't see them very often in color. The lampshade, I would say, is really the lithophane part here. These lampshades were sold independently. You could put them on whatever.
GUEST: That's what I did here.
APPRAISER: You put these two together, did you?
GUEST: Yeah, I got the shade, and then we went hunting for something that would be a good base for it, and we found this in a shop. They told me it's about the same era as the shade.
APPRAISER: They told you correctly. We call that, in my business, a marriage, when two things are put together, but I'm going to say this is a very happy marriage. It's okay in this case because the shades were sold independently and you did exactly what was intended. This one, by the way, is French. There's a little mark inside it, which is hard to determine, but the coloration of it, and everything else about it, it's clearly a French one.
GUEST: That's good to know.
APPRAISER: What's the most you've ever paid for a lithophane?
GUEST: I paid $150, I believe, for the lampshade in the late '80s or '90s. I paid about $60, $75 for this. And these lithophanes I average probably $50 to $75 apiece when I bought them.
APPRAISER: Okay. Well, I think you did well. They're one of those things though that have not done remarkably well in terms of gaining in value. When something is very Victorian like this, very ornate, I certainly admire it, but it's not modern taste. So these-- a nice screen lithograph like this today would sell at auction for probably less than $400. I would say anywhere between $200 and $400. A Meissen one like this, about the same as a single panel, perhaps somewhere between $200 and $300. And if it weren't Meissen it would be less than that, less than $100. I would say, today in a good auction, that lithophane shade lamp is going to bring at least $700 or $800. So I think you did well.
GUEST: I thank you very much.
