Roseville Pottery

Roseville Pottery
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Our personal preference when it comes to pottery is Roseville and we have had several collections of it during the past 10 years. A Roseville Pottery Magnolia vase was the very first piece of pottery we ever purchased at auction. Roseville was selling for much more back then than it is today so, although we had seen a number of pieces at auction and at antiques stores, we hadn't bought any yet. That first piece came home with us and stayed with us for a couple of years. We finally owned an expensive piece of vintage art pottery at a pretty good price.

When we bought our auction house we put our one piece of Roseville in our first auction. We didn't want to part with it but we wanted our first sale to have as many nice things as possible. During the two years we had the Roseville Magnolia vase, the value of vintage art pottery had continued to appreciate so when we sold it we got back our investment and actually made a nice profit. Now we were really in love with Roseville Pottery.

Roseville produced many different lines, patterns and shapes over the years. Magnolia is one of the more common patterns. There are much more desirable patterns based on both looks and availability and they command some very high prices. These patterns include Wisteria, Baneda, Blackberry, Falline, Moss, Sunflower and a few others. Even though the present resale value of Roseville has declined over the past several years; same as other pottery, porcelain and glass; these harder to find patterns have managed to hold their own.

Roseville has a very rich and interesting history that provides great insight into the business world back at the turn of the 20th century. The company faced the same trials and tribulations that companies face today - keeping costs down, product and style changes to keep up with consumer demands, mergers, relocations and much more. The Roseville Pottery Company started in 1890 and was located in Roseville, Ohio, hence the name of the company. They eventually moved to Zanesville, Ohio which prompted the name of one of their most successful pottery lines called Rozane. "Ro" for Roseville and "zane" for Zanesville.

The company continued to grow and expand and by 1901 they had a total of 4 plants. They produced what is now considered to be quality art pottery for 64 years until finally closing their doors in 1954. There are a number of excellent Internet sites as well as collector books that offer a complete and detailed history of the Roseville Pottery Company and its management. It would be repetitious for us to include all of that background information here. If you are interested in Roseville, we recommend you check out some of these resources.

Historically, Ohio was where most pottery factories were located. Same as today, back then pottery was fired in kilns. Ohio provided a lot of land that contained rich dense clay and an endless abundance of natural gas. Natural gas allowed the kilns to attain degrees of heat that would not be possible with other firing methods. It was a major factor in the successful production of so much pottery by so many pottery companies.

Roseville has continued to be a big seller whether prices are up or down. After having sold our one piece, our fascination with Roseville continued and we decided to try to buy and sell it on a regular basis. We looked for it everywhere we went. We bought every piece we could find during the summer when the prices were more reasonable. The summer in the antiques and collectibles market can be pretty slow in Florida. However, in the fall, thousands of northerners usually descend on Florida to enjoy the nice balmy winter and a certain percentage of those northerners are antique dealers.

At our auction each winter when prices were up, we would sell the Roseville we had collected during the summer. We would place all the pieces, sometimes as many as 40, in the same auction rather than spacing them across several auctions. Now, there are two schools of thought on this. Many believe that if you have too much of the same type of item in the same auction, you are going to drive down the price. We do agree with this theory to a certain point. If we were talking about desks then too many in the same auction would most definitely hurt the auction value of each. That's because there are not too many people who collect just desks.

Countrywide there are some very serious collectors of Roseville and other items like it. If you only offer a couple of pieces then the really serious collectors or dealers won't come out for the auction unless they happen to live in the neighborhood. On the other hand, should you have a large quantity of it available you are going to draw a number of really good buyers because you have now made the trip worth their while.

Unless you are very familiar with Roseville and the various patterns and shapes they made, it will be difficult for you to easily identify some of it when you see it. Early on, Roseville was marked with foil labels that said Roseville. Over the years, many of these labels came off leaving these pieces with no identifying mark.

Some of the early pieces would carry a navy blue script style "R" stamped on the bottom. In the early 1930's, Roseville started marking their pieces with the name Roseville in semi-script which was indented into the pottery. Also included was a number to identify the shape along with a size to the nearest inch. It would look something like, Roseville 642-8". Later in the 1930's the mark was changed from indented to raised and the letters U.S.A. were added.

Many novices confuse pieces marked RRPCo as being Roseville. Please don't make this same mistake. RRPCo is the mark found on Robinson-Ransbottom Pottery. This pottery was also made in Roseville, Ohio. This can be very misleading if you are on a search for authentic Roseville Pottery. Robinson-Ransbottom Pottery does not have anywhere near the same value as real Roseville. Many people have paid too much for Robinson-Ransbottom thinking they were getting a great deal.

You must also be careful of the Roseville reproductions that are out there in the marketplace today. Reproductions, or "repops" as they are called, are shipped here from overseas. The countries making these fakes have done a poor job copying several of the original Roseville patterns. If you have not spent much time around the real deal, then you could be taken in by these repops which are actually marked Roseville. If you are familiar with real Roseville Pottery, you can spot a repop from the other side of the room.

Fake pieces are pretty much dull and the relief work on these pieces is poorly done. The best way to try to identify a fake is through the mark. After some initial fakes were let into the United States, the Customs Department had a problem with these imported pieces having "U.S.A." marked on them. So, now the fakes still say Roseville in raised lettering but there is a blank space where the U.S.A. should appear. As we mentioned earlier, Roseville did not use the raised name without the U.S.A. initials. Nothing is foolproof but this is the best way of identifying a repop if you are unable to evaluate the quality of the piece.

Our favorite auction story is about Roseville Pottery and dates back to 2003. For the most part, we had a mid-range auction house. We would sell some stuff that satisfied the needs of the flea market dealers, a lot of mid-range collectibles and furniture for the majority of our audience and we were also lucky enough to get a respectable amount of high-end items. One day the phone rang and when I answered it the woman at the other end said she had gotten our name at random out of the phone book. We were her first and only call. She stated that she had "some pottery" she wanted to auction off and she would be bringing over later that day.

Having auctioned off thousands of pieces of no name inexpensive pottery, we expected more of the same. In addition to the Roseville pieces my husband and I personally sold every year, we had sold some better pottery via consignments but it was usually one or two pieces at a time.

Later that day, the woman arrived in a truck with 30 huge boxes, all of which were sealed. She was in her 50's and said her aunt had left her all this pottery in her will but she hated it and just wanted it out of her garage. We wrote up a consignment sheet for her that listed 30 boxes of miscellaneous pottery to be sorted and tagged. She thanked us and left. We already had quite a bit of merchandise for our next sale so we didn't get to this consignment for a couple of days.

The woman who worked as our auction manager had 25 years of experience in both the auction business and the antiques business. There is nothing she doesn't know about antiques and collectibles. She has pretty much seen it all and is no longer impressed with any of it. To her it is just stuff.

When she finally found time to work on the large pottery consignment, I was doing paperwork in the office. I could hear our auction manager out in the warehouse say, "Wow!" Then I heard, "Oh my!" Then I heard, "Oh my God!" This was coming from the woman who thought everything was just "stuff"? I ran out into the warehouse to see what could have possibly caused this sudden burst of excitement. She had unpacked two of the big boxes. Neither one of us could believe what we were looking at.

There were about 20 pieces of really hard to find top of the line Roseville including a matching pair of large Wisteria lamps. Our manager had never seen a pair before so you know I had never seen a pair before either. We quickly unpacked the rest thinking we had just really lucked out on the first two boxes. When we were done we were looking at what could have been a Roseville museum.

Never had either of us seen so many rare and expensive pieces of Roseville to include all of the hard to find patterns I mentioned earlier. There were thousands and thousands of dollars worth - all in perfect condition as though it had never been used. The various pieces my husband and I had personally accumulated each year for resale never included any of these pieces!

Always my own worst enemy, I called the woman who had consigned the pottery.

Her name was Joanne. I wanted to know if she realized exactly what she had brought to us. There was a good chance she didn't know and would change her mind about selling it at our auction. After all, she had called it just "some pottery". Her response to me on the phone was, "Honey, I know exactly what I brought you and I still hate it. Go ahead and sell it."

So sell it we did! We did split it across two auctions because there was roughly 200 pieces in total and we already had a lot of other merchandise belonging to other consignors. Needless to say, we had two fabulous auctions in a row. We even managed to make some of the higher-end auction houses in Florida green with envy. Suddenly everyone knew we had this pottery and it was the talk of the town.

Several serious collectors flew in from different parts of the country in order to take home their fair share of this unbelievable find. Joanne was very pleased with the outcome. It did very well and she received two pretty hefty checks for all that "stuff" she hated. We called her after she received her second check because we wanted to know if she had any other aunts and did they collect anything. She has since moved to Arizona but we still touch base with each other every once in awhile.

We believe that Roseville Pottery and some of the other vintage art pottery will bounce back in value. No Roseville has been made for the last 55 years. Every year there is less and less of it out there. Thousands of pieces have been sold via online auctions and a certain percentage of those pieces have been broken or damaged during shipping, never to be replaced. It will become harder to find as time marches on which will drive up the price. But in the meantime, we should all just enjoy looking at it.

Written by Anne Benedetto, Auction House Talk
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