Q: Here are photographs of plates that I hope are valuable. There are 13 of them, but originally there were 16. They are 10 ½ inches in diameter. I look forward to hearing from you, although my dreams of selling the set and retiring with the money seems to be just that — a dream.
A: Thank you for the pictures. They help tremendously in making an evaluation.
When I first opened the envelope and saw the yellowish color, I thought, “Wow, these could be great — maybe even Tiffany or Steuben. Unfortunately, a closer look quickly disabused me of this idea, and I realized these were made in Bohemia using a rather typical design that is often seen in the marketplace.
Glass started being produced in the Bohemian/Silesian area of the current Czech Republic in the 1200s because the area was rich in the necessary natural ingredients such as potash, chalk and plenty of wood to fuel the glass furnaces. Fine quality glassware continued to be made to this day in towns such as Skalice, Kamenicky Senov, Karlovy Vary and Novy Bor.
Glassmaking flourished there particularly in the late 17th through mid-18th centuries when Casper Lehmann, the gem cutter to Emperor Rudolph II (whose capital was in Prague), adapted the techniques of his craft to the engraving of glass using copper and bronze wheels. This, in fact, is the method used to engrave the plates in today’s question.
During the second half of the 19th century, Bohemian makers began turning out glass products by the literal boatload. Their emphasis was essentially mass produced export wares that were widely available in both Europe and the United States. This was so successful and the competition so fierce that Bohemian makers put many American, French, British and German glasshouses out of business.
The Bohemian makers specialized in making pairs of vases either in a single color of opaque glass or in two color varieties. These were decorated with quickly enameled flowers, or with prints of famous paintings.
In addition, many, pieces were embellished with wheel cut decorations — usually in two colors with the most commonly found being red cut to clear, but amber cut to clear (like the plates in today’s question) is also quite frequently seen. The most usually seen decoration is a stag in the forest often shown in conjunction with a castle, and this describes the pieces belonging to you.
Also found on these plates are rococo-style shells that are big and cover a lot of space on the surface. These were very easy to cut on the wheel, so they were used to reduce the time it took to decorate these pieces and thus cut the cost of production drastically.
Bohemian 10-plus inches diameter plates with rarer colors cut to clear and far more elaborate designs can bring prices in the $750 to $900 each at auction, but standard examples such as the ones shown here bring only about five percent of this price each (if that much). As a grouping, this set of 13 plates should retail in the $250 to $300 range and might be difficult to sell.
