How to Buy or Sell — Pottery & Porcelain

An aunt left you her household belongings representing fifty or more years of accumulation, including figurines, lamps, kitchen mixing bowls, pottery crocks that held pickles, flower vases, dresser sets, ashtrays, three sets of dishes, and serving pieces. How would you sell everything for the best total price? Age and quality of ceramics do influence price, but a 1950 Hall pottery pitcher could be worth more than an 1850 German bowl. The whims of collectors determine the value, and sometimes the fashion of the day makes originally inexpensive pieces more important. The stoneware crocks that were cheap food-storage containers during the 1800s, yellowware, the Art Deco dishes of the 1920s, the nineteenth-century R. S. Prussia pieces decorated with voluptuous women, and some recent art pottery and California studio pottery sell for higher prices than pieces from famous English factories from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.