Antiques Roadshow “beating the heart” of the six figure price guest for a £4 charity vase

An Antiques Roadshow guest was left giggling with excitement and a racing heart when his thrift store vase turned out to be a genuine treasure. The American version of the show stopped in Indianapolis, where participants brought interesting items and stories for experts to evaluate, and specialist David Rago returned to evaluate an amazing vase.

“My wife and I were shopping at a local Goodwill and I saw it sitting on the shelf and thought, ‘Oh, that’s so beautiful,'” the owner said. “I knew it was good quality, but I didn’t know anything 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 (£3.93). , I’m going to buy it.'”

Rago revealed that the vase was made by Overbeck Pottery, an Indiana company started by four sisters, the Express reports. He noted that the piece was marked OBK for Overbeck and included the initials E and F for two of the sisters on its base.

He explained: “They had a number of periods of work that they produced, but for me the best period of their work was around their late teens, early 1920s. Arts and Crafts influences and that falls into in that alley of power.

“Conventional design is a design technique from the Arts and Crafts period that uses a geometric distillation of the original design, and you can see the conventionalization in this design. Have a repeating design that is five or six times around the vase. You have a man running in a striped suit, but behind him is a big pink sun shining through a tree.

“And you know it’s a tree because you’ve got the branches running like that, but those are the leaves that are shown as triangles. So they’ve conventionalized a tree there with a geometric minimum.”

The suspense built as it was time for the expert to reveal the value of the vase. The expert said: “It is a great example of their work. It’s colored, it’s matte painted, it’s hand thrown, it’s tooled, it shot very well.

“Virtually every side pulled equally, which is a technical achievement. At auction, it would fetch somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 (£39,300 – £78,700).”

On hearing this extravagant value, the guest was surprised and said, “I can’t believe it.”

Expert Rago said: “I mean, it’s a seriously, seriously good piece of Overbeck. It has everything it needs to have, this one has it.”

Visibly overwhelmed, the guest pounded his chest and called attention to his rapid heartbeat, saying: “Feel my heart beating.”

When asked about his original purchase price, the guest revealed that he only paid $4.99 for the precious piece — a revelation that prompted a quiet fist bump from the pundit.