She Almost Donated It. The Mark On The Base Said $12,000. Do you Have ONE in Your Home?
Walter Ashford
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👉 How to find out what your things are really worth → https://mrwalterashford.com
The box was by the front door, and it was the last one, and it was taped everywhere except the top. 📦
Four weeks of clearing a mother's house. The charity truck coming Tuesday. Folded clothes in the bottom, a lamp with no shade, a set of place mats — and sitting on top, because it was small and it fit, a little dark vase about seven inches tall.
Let me be straight about the title before anything else. No mark on the base of anything has ever said twelve thousand dollars. Bases do not carry prices. What that base carried was four separate marks in four different hands, and what those four marks said was who decorated it, who threw it, what clay it was made of, and which one it was out of a numbered run a college kept count of for forty years.
⭐ AND THE DETAIL THAT REFRAMES EVERYTHING: a mark is not a signature. It is a sentence — and almost everybody reads the first word of it and stops. She had a rule, and her rule was reasonable: pretty and matching stays, everything else goes. A small drab vase with no name on the front and no shine on it is the purest possible example of everything else. It did not go in the box because she was careless. It went in the box because it fit. That is the actual mechanism. Not carelessness. Geometry.
So we read the base out loud, mark by mark, so you can do it tonight on your own pieces:
🔵 THE CIPHER — an N sitting inside a bigger C. Newcomb College Pottery, New Orleans, a degree-granting college for women, 1895 to about 1940. Fixed supply, forever.
✍️ THE DECORATOR'S MARK — the initials of the individual woman who cut those oak trees into wet clay with her own hand, in a decade when most women making beautiful things were credited nowhere at all.
🏺 JM — Joseph Meyer, who threw the shapes for about thirty years, because the college took the view that a woman at a wheel was not quite the thing. Two people made that pot and both of them said so on the bottom.
🔢 THE REGISTRATION CODE — a letter or two and a number, run from 1901 to 1942, A through Z then AA, BB, a hundred pieces to each letter. By 1941 they had reached ZY. The base does not just tell you roughly when. It tells you WHICH ONE.
💵 THE NUMBERS, REAL AND PUBLISHED — Rago, January 2025: a large scenic Newcomb vase by Anna Frances Simpson, 1926, live oaks, Spanish moss and full moon, estimated $7,500-10,000, sold for $12,065. Same house, September 2024: a Newcomb scenic vase with palmettos, $10,710.
🚫 AND THE HONEST HALF — the gap between "a Newcomb piece" and THAT Newcomb piece is enormous. Size, subject, decorator, date and condition each move it hard, and there are a great many Newcomb pieces that sell for a few hundred dollars. The record, for the sake of saying it out loud, is $169,200 at Neal in 2009 — and your piece is not that piece. Mine is not either.
🔥 THE SAME HABIT, DIFFERENT POTTERY — you are far likelier to own Rookwood than Newcomb, and a Rookwood base is just as crowded: count the flames above the reversed RP and add them to 1886, then read the shape number, the size letter and the decorator's cipher.
👉 THE RULE THAT TRANSFERS TO EVERYTHING YOU OWN: one mark is a factory. More than one mark is a stop sign. When a base carries several separate marks in several different hands, somebody was keeping records about that individual object at the moment it was made — and people do not keep records about things they do not care about.
Do not sort by the front. The front of an object was designed to sell it in 1926. The back of it was designed to record it forever.
Turn it over. Read the bottom.
📕📗📘 The three books — Turn It Over · Never Take the First Offer · The Ashford Ledger
https://mrwalterashford.com
#WalterAshford #Antiques #NewcombPottery #ArtPottery #PotteryMarks #KnowWhatYouOwn #TurnItOver #Rookwood #NewOrleans #ArtsAndCrafts #AntiqueValues #Heirlooms #EstateSale #EstateClearance #CharityShopFind #ThriftFind #MakersMarks #Collectibles #Downsizing #Inheritance #AntiqueTips #VintagePottery #SeniorLiving #AshfordLedger #ReadTheBase
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She Almost Donated It. The Mark On The Base Said $12,000. Do you Have ONE in Your Home?
Walter Ashford
478 views
👉 How to find out what your things are really worth → https://mrwalterashford.com
The box was by the front door, and it was the last one, and it was taped everywhere except the top. 📦
Four weeks of clearing a mother's house. The charity truck coming Tuesday. Folded clothes in the bottom, a lamp with no shade, a set of place mats — and sitting on top, because it was small and it fit, a little dark vase about seven inches tall.
Let me be straight about the title before anything else. No mark on the base of anything has ever said twelve thousand dollars. Bases do not carry prices. What that base carried was four separate marks in four different hands, and what those four marks said was who decorated it, who threw it, what clay it was made of, and which one it was out of a numbered run a college kept count of for forty years.
⭐ AND THE DETAIL THAT REFRAMES EVERYTHING: a mark is not a signature. It is a sentence — and almost everybody reads the first word of it and stops. She had a rule, and her rule was reasonable: pretty and matching stays, everything else goes. A small drab vase with no name on the front and no shine on it is the purest possible example of everything else. It did not go in the box because she was careless. It went in the box because it fit. That is the actual mechanism. Not carelessness. Geometry.
So we read the base out loud, mark by mark, so you can do it tonight on your own pieces:
🔵 THE CIPHER — an N sitting inside a bigger C. Newcomb College Pottery, New Orleans, a degree-granting college for women, 1895 to about 1940. Fixed supply, forever.
✍️ THE DECORATOR'S MARK — the initials of the individual woman who cut those oak trees into wet clay with her own hand, in a decade when most women making beautiful things were credited nowhere at all.
🏺 JM — Joseph Meyer, who threw the shapes for about thirty years, because the college took the view that a woman at a wheel was not quite the thing. Two people made that pot and both of them said so on the bottom.
🔢 THE REGISTRATION CODE — a letter or two and a number, run from 1901 to 1942, A through Z then AA, BB, a hundred pieces to each letter. By 1941 they had reached ZY. The base does not just tell you roughly when. It tells you WHICH ONE.
💵 THE NUMBERS, REAL AND PUBLISHED — Rago, January 2025: a large scenic Newcomb vase by Anna Frances Simpson, 1926, live oaks, Spanish moss and full moon, estimated $7,500-10,000, sold for $12,065. Same house, September 2024: a Newcomb scenic vase with palmettos, $10,710.
🚫 AND THE HONEST HALF — the gap between "a Newcomb piece" and THAT Newcomb piece is enormous. Size, subject, decorator, date and condition each move it hard, and there are a great many Newcomb pieces that sell for a few hundred dollars. The record, for the sake of saying it out loud, is $169,200 at Neal in 2009 — and your piece is not that piece. Mine is not either.
🔥 THE SAME HABIT, DIFFERENT POTTERY — you are far likelier to own Rookwood than Newcomb, and a Rookwood base is just as crowded: count the flames above the reversed RP and add them to 1886, then read the shape number, the size letter and the decorator's cipher.
👉 THE RULE THAT TRANSFERS TO EVERYTHING YOU OWN: one mark is a factory. More than one mark is a stop sign. When a base carries several separate marks in several different hands, somebody was keeping records about that individual object at the moment it was made — and people do not keep records about things they do not care about.
Do not sort by the front. The front of an object was designed to sell it in 1926. The back of it was designed to record it forever.
Turn it over. Read the bottom.
📕📗📘 The three books — Turn It Over · Never Take the First Offer · The Ashford Ledger
https://mrwalterashford.com
#WalterAshford #Antiques #NewcombPottery #ArtPottery #PotteryMarks #KnowWhatYouOwn #TurnItOver #Rookwood #NewOrleans #ArtsAndCrafts #AntiqueValues #Heirlooms #EstateSale #EstateClearance #CharityShopFind #ThriftFind #MakersMarks #Collectibles #Downsizing #Inheritance #AntiqueTips #VintagePottery #SeniorLiving #AshfordLedger #ReadTheBase