Antiques Roadshow: 40 Years of Great Finds. Paul Atterbury
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still remembers the sense of excitement and discovery when he first saw the bottle lying in the shopping basket. ‘I have always loved Victorian design, particularly exceptional things like this. Burges was a genius, staggeringly original in his ideas and his craft. Great metalwork by him so rarely comes onto the market. We have had one other major Burges piece in forty years of the Roadshow, a brooch that Geoffrey Munn found. I still feel exactly the same about the bottle, it will always be a highlight of my Roadshow life. It was a classic case of being in the right place at the right time. And sharing it with David was a treat, I think we both knew we were very lucky.’
Today, the William Burges bottle is probably worth £60,000.
One of the highlights of a rather wet Roadshow at Bodnant Gardens, Wales, in 2009 was a powerful equestrian bronze of a Sioux warrior. Furniture specialist Christopher Payne, who has written books about nineteenth century bronzes, was excited to see it, partly because of its rarity and also because it is unusual to find American bronzes of this quality in Britain.
Called Appeal to the Great Spirit, and the final sculpture in a series of four equestrian pieces known as the Epic of the Indian, it was modelled in 1909 by Cyrus Dallin and cast in Paris. The first of the series, A Signal of Peace, was shown in Chicago in 1893; the second The Medicine Man in Paris in 1899; the third, The Protest in St Louis in 1904; and the fourth, Appeal, in Paris in 1909. Born in Utah in 1861, Dallin was a prolific and well-known sculptor who produced over 240 works, many inspired by a view of American history that he shared with Frederick Remington, the other great American sculptor of this period. Dallin grew up with native North American children, developing a great respect for tribal history and culture at a time when that aspect of American history was under threat. The full-size version of Appeal to the Great Spirit has stood outside the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston since 1912. In America, there are other full-size versions of what is now seen as Dallin’s greatest work. In 1922 a small edition of small versions was issued, with other editions following until Dallin’s death in 1944. Since then, this iconic sculpture has been frequently reproduced.
Christopher Payne often picks this as one of his favourite Roadshow moments, because the bronze brought to Bodnant was one of the early casts, not a later reproduction. For that reason he valued it between £60,000 and £80,000, knowing that another early cast had sold in New York in 2005 for $120,000. He explained the bronze’s powerful message to the owner, namely that the story of native North American culture was being obliterated by the rapid development of industrialised white America, a message that perhaps resonates even more powerfully today. Hence the title – the Appeal to the Great Spirit – to save the tribe and all it represents.
The owner knew little about it, having acquired it about ten years earlier from his wife’s father, someone he described as ‘an eccentric local bank manager whose hobby was marrying wealthy heiresses’.
‘An ordinary slipware mug would have been an exciting find but the figures, like Ozzy, are rarer still, so he really was a very important discovery.’
Henry Sandon
In September 1989, Northampton’s Derngate Centre was the setting for one of the Roadshow’s most famous finds – a Staffordshire slipware owl with a detachable head, known ever since as Ozzy the Owl, even though this was the name of the mascot used by Sheffield Wednesday Football Club. The lady owner brought the owl to the Roadshow on the bus, and was very taken aback by the excitement it had generated. She could not remember how it had come into the family, only that it had been there for years, first owned by her aunt and then by her mother, and had often been used, without the head, as a flower vase.
AN IMPORTANT AND DISTINCTIVE DISCOVERY
Slipware is one of the earliest and most distinctive types of British domestic pottery, widely in use throughout the seventeenth century. The technique of decorating ordinary red, brown or buff clays with slip, or liquid clay, in other colours is even older, dating at least from the medieval period. Various decorative techniques, including pouring or dotting the slip onto the surface, scratching designs through the poured slip – a process known as sgraffito – and feathering it into swirly patterns with a quill, were all carried out before the pot was fired. When fully decorated, the pot was given a clear, lead glaze.
Slipware was associated with many parts of Britain, including the West Country, Kent, South Wales, the Midlands and Yorkshire, but the main centre of production was Staffordshire. Dishes, bowls, mugs and other domestic wares were made in large quantities by many Staffordshire potters throughout the seventeenth century and into the early years of the eighteenth, often with a distinctive and complex style of slip decoration that makes them readily identifiable. The most famous pieces are large chargers, intricately decorated in raised slip with mottoes and texts, portraits, cross-hatching and other patterns, usually in a complex but appealingly primitive style. Feathering was a favoured Staffordshire technique, creating an intricately patterned surface that looked like marbling. Some Staffordshire slipware potters are known – for example, Thomas Toft – but the majority remain anonymous, including the maker of the owls with their detachable heads. A small number are recorded, mostly in museums, and expert Henry Sandon believes that they all came from the hands of one potter.
During the filming, Henry was barely able to contain his excitement.Clutching the owl to his chest, he said that he had never handled one before. In fact, he seemed quite reluctant to give it back to the owner! He explained how the head could be used as a drinking cup, a type of vessel known in various forms since the Egyptian era. ‘Surviving pieces of Staffordshire slipware are rare and desirable, but this little drinking pot – the body would have been used as a jug and the head as a cup – is in feathered slipware, which is even rarer.’ The lady owner, increasingly bemused both by Henry’s enthusiasm and what he was telling her, was visibly shocked as he steadily increased the value from £500 to £20,000. ‘Well. I never’, was her only response. After the filming, the lady and her owl were sent home in a taxi, accompanied by two policemen, much to the consternation of her mother when she opened the front door.
BACK TO ITS ROOTS
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was little interest in Staffordshire slipware and it was generally dismissed as peasant pottery. It was not properly appreciated until the 1880s, when the first book about it appeared. Entitled The Art of the Old English Potter, it was written by the great French artist and designer L. M. Solon, who worked with Staffordshire ceramics company Mintons from the early 1870s. Since then, high-quality Staffordshire slipware has always been seen as rare and desirable although, unfortunately, fakes have been made since the late Victorian period. However, there was no doubt about Ozzy’s authenticity.
Not long after Ozzy’s Roadshow appearance, the family decided to part with him. He was put up for sale at Phillips auction house in London and sold for £22,000 to an agent acting on behalf of the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent. So the owl returned home and now lives in a special case in the museum, not far from where he was made in the late seventeenth century. Immediately popular, the owl has become a kind of mascot for the museum, and his presence there has greatly increased the number of visitors. On a couple of occasions since then, Henry Sandon has been reunited with Ozzy and, together, the two revisited Henry’s greatest Roadshow moment and the show’s most famous find. Later, the former owner told Henry that she had used some of the money