GUEST: Me and my wife were shopping at a local
Goodwill. I saw it sitting on the shelf, and I thought,
"Aw, it's so beautiful." And I knew it was good quality, but I knew
nothing about it, so I picked it up and looked, it had markings. And I thought, "Well, I don't know who it
is, but for $4.99, I'm going to buy it." APPRAISER: Overbeck Pottery is an Indiana
company. They were four sisters. This piece is marked-- as almost all Overbeck
pieces are—this piece is marked "OBK" for Overbeck, and the sisters' initials, E and
F, also incised into the surface of the pot. They had a number of periods of work that
they produced. But to me, the best period of their work was
around late teens, early '20s. Arts and Crafts influence, and this falls
into that power alley. Conventionalized design is an Arts and Crafts
period design technique that uses a geometric distillation of the original design. And you can see the conventionalization in
this design. You've got a repeated design that's five or
six times around the vase. You've got a running man in a striped suit. But behind him is a big pink sun, which is
shining through a tree. And you know it's a tree, because you have
the branches running by the guy, but these are the leaves that are shown as triangles. So they've conventionalized a tree there with
bare geometric minimum. It's such a great example of their work. It's colorful, it's matte-painted, it's hand-thrown,
it's tooled, it fired very well. Virtually every side fired evenly, which is
a technical achievement. At auction, it would bring somewhere between
$50,000 and $100,000. GUEST: I can't believe that. APPRAISER: I mean, it's a seriously, seriously
good piece of Overbeck. (laughing) APPRAISER: It's got everything it's got to
have, this one's got it. GUEST: Feel my heart thumping. APPRAISER: And you paid how much for this? GUEST: $4.99.
