'Antiques Roadshow' guest calls her vase 'ugly' and then ends up getting a five-figure appraisal
Just because an old artifact lying around in the house looks ugly, doesn't mean that it should be thrown out. Taking it to "Antiques Roadshow" to get appraised might just reveal that it's worth thousands of dollars. The owner of a Jean Cocteau Ceramic Sculpture had no idea about its significance, as she only bought it because it looked interesting to her. In the end, the show's expert appraised the item at more than $15,000, providing a 30x return for the guest.
In the episode, the guest shared the interesting story of how she acquired the unique-looking item. "We call it the ugly thing or the ugly vase. I bought it about 15 years ago. I'm never sure if it's a pregnant woman or if she's getting to topple over. It's a weird little piece. I liked it when I saw it," she shared. She added that she bought it from a Dutch dealer for about $580. The show's expert, Suzanne Perrault, said that the vase was a wonderful, modernist, but bizarre piece. "It has animal, it has bird, it has female figural. All of this happening in this piece of glazed ceramic that was done by a very famous artist called Jean Cocteau," she explained.
Perrault added that Cocteau was a French fine artist, a painter, a draftsman, and a poet as well. "Picasso, a painter of great renown, wanted to move to a different type of medium. And had visited this pottery in the town of Vallauris and was taken by their operation, and wanted to do some ceramics in editions. Picasso started that in '47, and his good friend Jean Cocteau who did this, could see the pleasure," the expert shared.
She further explained that Cocteau started in '57 and he made sculptures till his death in the '60s. "He did about 300 different forms. This would probably have been done circa 1960s. We see often Modernist, simple, fun designs, but they're often on plates," Cocteau added. Coming to the vase, she showed that the horns were designed to come off, and it wasn't a mistake. The artist deliberately included it just to make the piece more unique or bizarre.
"And then you can see on the bottom, it says here 'Original edition from Jean Cocteau, Studio Madeline-Jolly,' and six out of ten. Marie Madeline Jolly and also Philippe Jolly, the two of them, were artists and had this ceramic studio. They were in Villefranche France. This is a very small edition," Cocteau noted.
She further stated that it was the first time that she had seen a piece from that edition that was made in Madoura with Picasso. She estimated that it must have been a prototype that the artist made for prints to be reproduced by the studio. Coming to the appraisal, the expert noted, "Though it is an edition, easily we would put this in at $10,000 to $15,000 at auction."
This blew the guest away as she wasn't expecting to hear such a large number. "That's fun, for an ugly vase. Perfect. Wonderful, thank you," she said in the end.
