Q: I think this brass belt buckle came from my children’s great-grandfather. There are two clasped hands on the front and the words “Union Pacific, Railroad Company, Links East to West, 1866” on the front and “Made in USA” on the back. I’d like to know if it’s the real thing. What is it worth?
A: This belt buckle isn’t old. Reproduction (fake) belt buckles with vintage designs and the names of old companies were made in the late 1960s and ’70s. Although the design on the buckle seems to commemorate the linking of eastern and western United States by the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, that wasn’t accomplished until 1869. Union Pacific laid the tracks going from east to west, while Central Pacific Railroad laid tracks going from west to east. Union Pacific reached the 100th meridian, considered the dividing line between eastern and western U.S., in 1866. This was cause for great celebrations because the company had to cross the 100th meridian by 1867 in order to continue to receive government funding. The Golden Spike (the last spike) was driven in at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory on May 10, 1869. “Reproduction” belt buckles sell for $10 to $20. When first made and thought to be old, some sold for hundreds of dollars.
Look Out for Fakes
Dear Lee,
Last month we watched an online auction of the belongings of a well-known dealer and friend. She dealt in top quality antiques for more than 50 years. So when her famous Tiffany Peony lamp brought $250,000, no one was surprised. But after the sale, the lamp was examined by an expert and found to be a fake. My friend had bought this lamp for her home from a well-known dealer over 50 years ago, before modern methods for testing metals, glass chemistry, etc. were available.
With today’s equipment and techniques, fakes are easier to find. In 1970 the Ford Museum bought a 17th-century rare “Brewster” chair similar to the few other Pilgrim chairs known to exist. A modern woodworker had wanted to prove to curators that he could make furniture pieces as good as the old ones using old tools. To demonstrate his skill, he made the chair and deliberately hid a clue—he used a modern tool inside a piece of it. In 1977, long after the museum announced and exhibited their spectacular antique find, the woodworker informed the museum he had made the chair and could prove it. All they had to do was X-ray the leg and they would see a hole that was pointed, made by a modern, electric drill bit, not rounded like old drill holes. The story broke that this chair was a fake made by a still-living woodworker who tried to fool the experts. It was taken off display but can still be viewed sometimes when the museum talks about fakes.
In 2015, a desk was shown at the Winter Antiques show in New York. It was identified as a Bingham Family Civil War Memorial Secretary, a period piece with inlaid bone decoration and slogans. It was vetted at the show as antique and sold to a dealer who sold it to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art for a rumored $375,000. In 2017 the desk was removed to be studied. A 2018 story in an antiques newspaper reported that a forger, Harold Gordon, had embellished an antique desk with the bone inlay. All the well-known expert dealers were fooled. Most fakes are found with incorrect patina or construction, nail holes, modern screws or new paint. But we received a letter from Michael Rodman who was a dealer and a typographer, who knew the piece was a fake from the pictures. The type style used for the inlaid slogans was Times New Roman (similar to the font used in this newsletter) that was not created until 1932. (See Kovels’ Letter to Lee, July, 2018.) It was the first time we had thought about dating an antique using a type style!
Today it’s even easier to be fooled. Many paintings worth thousands of dollars have been faked and sold by legitimate dealers who had been fooled. Glafira Rosales was an art dealer who sold the Knoedler Gallery millions of dollars’ worth of fake paintings before being caught and sent to jail. Some of the fakes were even the wrong color and size.
Remember the saying: “If it’s too good to be true, it usually is.” Shaker boxes, weathervanes, metal garden furniture, recasts of bronze figures, tin store signs and cans, figural napkin rings and folk art are all being copied today. Small glass wares by Heisey and Fenton, Depression glass, and even old bottles can be copied, sun-colored, or embellished with painted decoration to look rare. Midcentury furniture is being “reissued” and is much less expensive than the vintage original pieces.
Dead Sea Scroll Fragments in D.C. Museum Are Fakes
Visitors to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., have been awed by 16 fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known pieces of the original Hebrew bible, dating from about 400 BC to 300 AD. The scrolls, considered the basis of the Hebrew Bible, were discovered in clay pots in caves in Palestine’s West Bank in the 1940s. The fragments came on the market in 2002 and were bought for an undisclosed amount of money. The had been on display since the museum opened in 2017.
Experts from the company Art Fraud Insights now say the fragments are made from old Roman-era leather, aged and written on. The fragments had been under suspicion from the start. They were part of what is known as the “post-2002” fragments dealers began to selling at that time. Using microscopes and chemical analysis, the Art Fraud team found inconsistencies such as animal glue, which wouldn’t have existed at the time.
