If you ever had the chance of watching an expert collector of vintage pottery at work, you'd know how complex the process of picking an authentic antique piece for a collection can get.
Going by the kind of artistry that goes into making fakes and restoring damaged pieces to pass off as mint these days, you certainly need all the experience and expert knowledge you can find.
Here's the thing - it is possible to restore vintage or antique pottery. An otherwise beautiful piece can have suffered damage in the form of chipping or worn-off gilding, over time.
Dealers who wish to pass these off as 'mint', may want to find ways to repair damage and restore the pieces - all in pursuit of a higher price.
The fair practice of course would be to label these pieces as having been restored. To any novice antique pottery enthusiast, these repairs would be completely unnoticeable.
When you go out shopping for antique pottery, it would be a good move to go equipped with a small hand-held ultraviolet light. Play it on the piece that catches your fancy, and any repairs should show up right away.
If that doesn't seem possible, try tapping the part on a piece with a coin that seems a little off. It should ring differently than when you tap its surroundings. Antique pottery makes are a big deal.
The markings at the bottom of a piece of china from the manufacturer will tell you which highly esteemed antique pottery maker made them - Roseville, Moorcroft, Van Briggle, are all great names to aim for.
But if these are names that are printed on the bottom and not impressed, they need special scrutiny. Not all apparently antique pottery in mint condition is antique either.
Sometimes, manufacturers keep molds from an original run decades earlier, and to meet demand in the present, make new runs of freshly-made pottery in the same mold. These are called reissues.
These have the effect though of causing considerable confusion among pottery collectors and dealers alike. One problem here to pay attention to is that new pottery in a vintage mold can lack the kind of finishing and finesse of an original.
In a market flooded with Chinese fakes that betray poor attention to detail though, telling the fakes apart from the real ones can be a bit easier.
The best way to learn your way around that antique pottery scene would be to begin collecting pieces from one particular series so that you can thoroughly familiarize yourself with all that goes into an original. It is knowledge of this kind that is the real mark of a collector, after all.
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