GUEST: Me and my wife were shopping at a local Goodwill. I saw it sitting on the shelf, and I thought, "Oh, it's so beautiful." And I knew it was good quality, but I knew nothing about it, so I picked it up and looked. It had markings. And I thought, "Well, I don't know who it is, but for $4.99, I'm going buy it."
APPRAISER: Overbeck Pottery is an Indiana company. They were four sisters. This piece is marked... as almost all Overbeck pieces are, this piece is marked "OBK" for "Overbeck," and the sisters' initials E and F also incised into the surface of the pot. They had a number of periods of work that they produced, but to me, the best period of their work was around late teens, early '20s. Arts and Crafts influence. And this falls into that power alley. Conventionalized design is an Arts and Crafts period design technique that uses a geometric distillation of the original design. And you can see that conventionalization in this design. You've got the repeated design. It's five or six times around the vase. You've got a running man in a striped suit. But behind him is a big pink sun, which is shining through a tree. And you know it's a tree because you have the branches running by the guy. But these are the leaves that are shown as triangles. So they've conventionalized a tree to its bare geometric minimum. It's such a great example of their work. It's hand thrown, it's tooled. It fired very well-- virtually every side fired evenly, which is a technical achievement. At auction, it would bring somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000.
GUEST: I can't believe that.
APPRAISER: It's a seriously, seriously good piece of Overbeck.
GUEST: Oh, my goodness.
APPRAISER: It's got... everything it's got to have, this one's got it.
GUEST: My heart... thumping.
APPRAISER: And you paid how much for this?
GUEST: $4.99.
