When you find a piece of Asian porcelain or pottery, you must always remember that the writing in the mark does not always indicate the maker or age; you may have a later exact copy. Chinese and Japanese ceramics show…
Chinese potters made restrained, well-designed pottery or porcelain for use in their own country. Chinese porcelain was considered a rarity worth more than gold when the first few pieces were brought back to Europe by Marco Polo in the late…
A cache of Chinese porcelains that dated from as early as the 1700s sold at James D. Julia’s recent Asian Antiques auction. The pictured pieces are a cross-section of the sale’s Chinese porcelains, which ranged in price from $119 to…
Is an antique ''clobbered'' Chinese vase a valuable Asian ceramic? Fifty years ago, if you were clobbered it meant someone beat you up. Recent auction catalogs have been describing porcelains using this word, and at an April 2015 Neal auction,…
Tulip mania, a strange financial ''bubble'' in Holland in the 1630s, made a tulip bulb cost up to ten times the yearly income of a skilled craftsman, according to some writers. So the flowers became a status symbol and the…
Collecting is a pastime in almost every country. Children start with stones and leaves and bottle caps and free toys that come with a Happy Meal. Adults search for things by great artists, or things that bring memories of new…