GUEST: I bought them in the south of France in the 1980s. I bought this one first and then I bought this one after. I have a friend who was an art dealer. I liked this one so much that I asked him if he could get me another one, and he couldn't, but he was able to get me this plate. He was an art dealer in faience.
APPRAISER: And what are they?
GUEST: They're Picasso ceramics.
APPRAISER: So you probably know that Picasso went down to the south of France in about 1946. It must have been really nice for him to kind of discover a new medium. And he visited this show where they were selling ceramics, and he saw the RamiÈs, the family who was making ceramics for Madoura, got to know them, and started making some pieces on his own and really liked it and went back for many years. He probably went back for up to 24 years, and he made thousands of pieces with them.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: He wasn't painting as much anymore, and he was just really channeling something new and working with motifs from nature and portraits and bullfights, but in ceramic. And of those 3,500 or so, they picked over 600 and they started making editions. This one was done in an edition of 500, and this one, an edition of 450. And they were designed very close to each other. This one was a little bit earlier, 1954. This one was 1955.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And if you can't afford a Picasso painting, you can still afford these lovely ceramics. But the prices are going up, and they're going up pretty quickly. Now this one, which is called "Gray Engraved Pitcher," which may very well be a descriptive title and not an actual title that Picasso would have given it, has this decoration of faces and an owl in the middle, and it has some little chips at the bottom, so that's going to affect the price. These are faience and they are fairly low-fired, so they're prone to chipping. And I'm going to show the bottom and the mark here. Do you remember when you bought them what you paid for them?
GUEST: I remember what I bought the pitcher for. I paid $1,000 for the pitcher. So I'm thinking since I bought this probably about less than a year later, it was around the same price.
APPRAISER: This pitcher with these chips would probably be, at auction, somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: This one seems to me in perfect condition. The signature on that, the impressed mark, is the same as this one. This has been doing very well at auction and would probably be fetching somewhere between $12,000 and $15,000.
GUEST: Oh, that's interesting. I would have thought the pitcher would have brought more.
APPRAISER: The pitcher, had it been in perfect condition, could bring around $8,000, by and large.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Sometimes they bring more, but you can't really count on that. So the chips bring it down a little.
GUEST: I understand. I'm sure I probably put them there. (laughing)
