GUEST: These belonged to my mother. My father was a doctor, and they lived in Ohio. He quite often would go to New York, and he liked the female form. So he quite often would bring home beautiful things that had this nice form on it.
APPRAISER: What you have is a dresser garniture. These were made by R. Lalique, by René Lalique, in the 1920s; they're French. But ordinarily, you usually just see one of these at a time. I was really quite flabbergasted when you came in with all three, because I've never seen the three together. Now, there probably was a box that went with it.
GUEST: There was.
APPRAISER: Oh, and what happened to the box?
GUEST: The cat jumped up on the dresser and knocked it off.
APPRAISER: We understand that happens. We love our cats, but...
GUEST: (laughing) Not that much.
APPRAISER: So what this is called, this particular bottle, it's called a "flacon," which means perfume. But it's actually an eau de toilette because it's a larger bottle. It's called "Myosotis." Myosotis means forget-me-nots. And if you look along the sides of these, you can see that these are little stylized forget-me-nots.
GUEST: Oh, I never noticed that.
APPRAISER: Now, they are very rare, very unusual, but they have a few condition problems.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: This one, which is the smallest of the three bottles, has two cracks in it.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: And then this one over here has a chip to the rim. And then this, you told me you couldn't get the stopper out. But that... I believe that that can be done. But we also have something in here, which we call a sickness or a cloudiness to the glass. And probably what happened is when you leave a stopper in, and there's still liquid inside, you get... This is how it ends up drying because you can't... It doesn't... the air doesn't come out of the piece. Now, this could be fixed, actually. If someone gets this top off, they could probably work on the inside. So that's a good thing. This, unfortunately, cannot be fixed.
GUEST: No, you’re right.
APPRAISER: We can't regenerate the glass. This can actually be ground down, this piece here.
GUEST: Oh, yes.
APPRAISER: This can be ground. Now, it will affect the piece, and it will... The value is already affected. Now, in the present state, the three of them, even though they all have condition issues, are worth... They would be sold in a retail store for around $8,000. If these were all perfect, they could be worth as much as $20,000 to $30,000 in a retail store.
GUEST: Thank you so much, and thank you for telling me about this.
