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Discover Mid-America — December 2007

How old is it? - Part 2

When it comes to estimating the age of antiques and collectibles, it's not enough for a dealer to put a best guess on the tag without so much as a question mark. Given the proliferation of fakes and imitations in the trade, an operating principle, for buyers and sellers alike, might better be to assume an unknown item is of later vintage until it can
be confirmed as earlier.

In last month's column, we began exploring this principle, and we saw that even the "obvious" age markers, such as the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 requiring that imports to the U.S. be marked with the country of origin, aren't necessarily helpful in determining the age of a given item. There are ways around the law. Besides, marking items with the country of origin had already become standard practice in European porcelain making long before the McKinley Tariff Act — meaning that such an item may actually be much older than 1890.

Rocker Blotter with tiger heads on knob and two prowling tigers on top. Incised carving is one clue to age and is delicately augmented with painted accents.

Finally, and most importantly given today's global travel and commerce, countries are only required to mark the country of origin in English when items are to be imported to the U.S. as the point of retail sale. What this all means is that much of the pottery and porcelain (for example) found on the general secondary market is actually hot out of the kiln, whether or not the mark includes the country of origin.

If your eye tells you an item is of quality manufacture and probably valuable, but you don’t know enough about the category it represents or the material it's made of, do your homework. That means asking the right questions and searching reliable sources for answers.

The conservative approach to assessing age: A case study

A shot of the top of the blotter shows full-figured tigers and tiger heads incised on the entire ball surface of the knob.

Recently, I bought, from my favorite dealer in quality auction box lots, the blotter and dip pen pictured here. The tag wisely said "Ivory?" — with the question mark.

I bought these because I fell in love with the intricate incised tiger carvings. The items had some wear on them, and I didn’t think they could be new. (After all, how many people use dip pens and blotters in the opening decade of the 21st century?) I guessed early-to mid-20th century was probably about right for the age.

After doing some research on how to distinguish elephant ivory from other forms of animal dentition, I could be reasonably sure that the knob on the rocker blotter (also called a boat blotter in Miller's) was, indeed, ivory because the cross-hatch structure that is said to be a defining characteristic of elephant ivory is clearly visible at the base of the knob. It’s reasonable to conclude the entire blotter and the pen shaft are elephant ivory, given the faintly discernible ivory patterns in the blotter's body.

Using style of decoration to assess age

Most of what I found in my own growing library on Asian antiques shows ivory carved in high relief. In Sandra Andacht's second edition of her popular price guide Oriental Antiques and Art (Krause 2003), I found a listing for a Japanese ivory brush pot, with incised carvings of birds, bats, insects and bamboo, dated to the early 20th century (p. 243) - which made me feel my estimate for the blotter and pen wasn't a bad guess.

When I "Googled" ivory items with incised tigers, I discovered an accessory piece, a small round, covered paste box, with the very same theme and style of decoration, offered on eBay. It was also described as elephant ivory and as made in Japan's Meiji period, probably circa 1900.

Very slim, carved ivory pen shaft with worn steel nib. Metal collar may be silver (polish comes away black) but difficult to tell with flaking black paint overlay. (The blue stain is ink, and can perhaps be removed once I research a way to do it safely! At the top of the pen shaft is a carved ant-like insect — probably an artist's mark.

However, I know better than to believe everything I read on eBay, and I could see nothing in the seller's credentials that indicated he/she had any expertise in identifying or dating the object being sold.

Subsequently, my online research found other items that might belong to a "set" of desk items with incised tigers, including a brush pot and another round paste box of about the same size but in a slightly different form than the one on eBay. None of these other sellers ventured a guess as to age.

Using form and function to assess age

Then I got the idea of researching the invention of the rocker/boat blotter. According to a web site called the "Early Office Museum" (www.officemuseum.com), The Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware has an advertisement for a rocker blotter that dates to 1878, and a rocker blotter made by another company was patented in 1880. Most sources peg the heyday of rocker blotter popularity to a fairly broad range between 1880 and 1950 - a little too broad still for trade purposes, but, nevertheless, narrowing the age within decades rather than centuries.

While I was at it, I decided to research the use of dip pens for Japanese calligraphy. According to the Kamakura web site on Japanese pens, school kids in Japan are still taught brush calligraphy: "No one had even heard of fountain pens until the 1910s, and then it was a tiny percentage — fountain pens were not commonplace until the 1930s"
(http://www.kamakurapens.com/makie/JapaneseAndFountainPens.html).

Here's a close up of the tiger carving on the pen. From tip to tail, the full tiger figure and its long tail wind around the circumference of the pen shaft.

This information dates the use of the Japanese dip pen between 1910 and 1930 — somewhat later than the c.1900 dating by the eBay auctioneer for the box in the same style but a reasonable enough range for purposes of tagging in a trade retail setting.

It would appear, then, that my original conservative intuitions about the age of these tiger-incised ivory scholar's items have served me well. In this case, it wasn't enough to ask generic age questions about Japanese carved ivory. I had to ask what light could be shed on age by 1) the style of decoration and 2) the form and function of the objects.

I'm as intrigued as ever with the prowling tigers motif — and my conservative approach to dating items I find on the secondary market has insulated me against disappointment that they aren't older than they are.

Peggy Whiteneck is a writer and collector living in East Randolph, VT. If you would like to suggest a topic she can address in her column, email her at allwrite@sover.net.

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