Seeing A Lot Of Fake Roseville Pottery Lately

Just an observation. At local auctions, antique malls, and online auctions. Many are poor quality reproductions that really shouldn't fool anybody that has handled much authentic Roseville Pottery as the glazing and designs are way off. Also the reproductions won't say "USA" on the bottom.

 

There have been a bunch of fakes for awhile. I suspect it's partly why the prices for the real thing got wonky. If you look at this site it shows some fakes with USA though it says that they mostly were the earlier versions.

http://www.laurelhollowpark.net/roseville/roseville.html

 

The reproductions are starting to develop a market of their own. Heavens knows why - those things are so ugly!
Don

 

The reproductions all look like they were painted by school kids in their first art class. Very sloppy.

Since Roseville Pottery was just about a county over from where I live, most auctioneers here do not take the fakes and if they do, they call them as fakes. This keeps them from being laughed at.

 

Unfortunately some of the auctioneers around my area defer to their consigners and refuse to call out fake Roseville. I've informed a few of them of several fake pieces of art pottery over the years and they don't care, saying their consigners told them it is legit and that they work for the consignor. Some newbies have gotten burned locally and online and if EBTH (online estate sale site) is a good gauge of the collecting community, some of the fakes sell for as much as the real deal when the fakes are not properly disclosed.

Anyways some auction houses on Live Auctioneers seem to sell a bunch of this junk as "2nd generation Roseville" and I'm sure some of it is being bought to resell to unsuspecting buyers at antique malls and flea markets on the local level.

Can't feel entirely too bad for buyers out some money though, they should have researched what they are buying as many of these fakes are laughable. I tried to tell a buyer at a local auction house that a piece was an obvious reproduction before the auction and they laughed me off saying that I was probably just after it myself since it was such a nice piece ...... they won the bid for $50. Next auction they come up to me and apologize.

 

Next auction they come up to me and apologize.

at which point I would have looked them right in the eye and said..
" do you know how hard it is to help a stranger to open their eyes....
when they have a closed mind !! "

 

Out antiquing this weekend. Must have seen 100 legit pieces of Roseville and about 15 reproductions (about 25% of the fakes being sold as reproductions).

One that stood out was a fake Magnolia creamer and sugar that was labeled fake but the seller still wanted $55 for the pair! That is not much less than what an authentic pair would retail for. As said above there must be a market for the horridly ugly stuff.

 

Joe, it's likely that the dealer got stung at the auction and paid for the fake as if it were genuine Roseville - thus the $55 price, an attempt to get their investment back. At least they were honest and are not trying to pass if off as real. It will soon turn up in another auction to be sold to yet another person who was duped.

I still don't understand, it's all so horrid and nothing at all like genuine Roseville. However, I DO think that with Magnolia it might be easier to pawn off. I call Magnolia the "bumpy, ugly pattern", not my fave at all.

 

Roseville opened in 1890 and closed in 1954. Fakes have been around since 1955 (61 years) and are now more common than the originals. Collecting, at least collecting popular items, is always a risky business but Roseville collectors are always trodding shaky ground.

 

Butt, meet ugly. Even I could figure that one for a fake, and I know next to nothing about Roseville. It looks like cheap Japanese import pottery from the 50s.