Posted 8 years ago
live.eclec…
(63 items)
Here is a Belleek Flowered Shamrock Basket. There is some loss to the delicate flowers around the edges. This is quite common on items with these fragile pieces. You can see each flower is different on this piece. Later pieces, the flowers are all the same. Given this was made between 1865 and 1889, the loss is amazingly minor. Finding these with no loss is no small feat (or price tag!). Even with the loss, I believe this particular item cost me around $100.
Baskets up to Belleek's 7th period do not have the standard Belleek marks. The number of strands, pads, and what is impressed on the pads tell what period it is; for 7th period and later there is a square pad attached to the bottom with the normal mark on it.
This basket is a 3-strand basket. If you look at the bottom you can see the weave uses 3 strands. There are 2 pads with "Belleek" impressed on the top one and "Co Fermanagh" impressed on the bottom one. Fermanagh is a county in Northern Ireland. This combination of items declares the basket from Belleek's 1st period.
Wow!
Delicate and beautiful and old Belleek! I agree, the little losses are more than acceptable.
Love this piece !
In the change to a parian pad with the Belleek mark versus the traditional parian strips with impressed numbers and letters, I've come across (now vintage) examples of baskets with the 6th and later marks on square pads with rounded corners, round pads, and even triangular pads with rounded corners.
In a few cases these newer type pads with Belleek marks have come off completely. One came off in my hand once and appeared glued instead of fired on as the parian strips were.
On this particular type of basket (called the Shamrock Basket, due to its overall three-lobed shape rather than the type of flower work), because the space is so tight, there's often only one parian strip on these that reads Belleek R [or (R) or ®], and because of lack of room they leave off the second strip so that you can't tell exactly which period it was made in.
The bottom strip would have been (if it was there) either "Co. Fermanagh" (used 1955 to 1979) or "Ireland" (used 1980 to 1985).
If the flower work is a little more crude and inelegant than usual, that's an indicator that it's PROBABLY the 1980-85 period, but that's no guaranty, and on most baskets the workmanship is surprisingly good and similar for either of these periods spanning 30 years.
It's only as the 1990s progressed that quality of both design, workmanship, and painting generally took a complete nosedive.
The scarce Clematis and Hawthorne baskets in plain white and (somewhat) pearlescent finish produced as new designs in the early 1990s are still quite good. As the decade progresses and George Moore manages to keep the pottery going by turning it into a manufacturer of kitsch sold on the likes of QVC instead of in fine china shops, this newer stuff can (mostly) be completely avoided.
Belleek may have stayed in business and even expanded and bought up other concerns, but they did so at the cost of hurting their own brand name and reputation, and this (along with the crash in the economy in 2008 and the fact that collectors have had 20+ years of eBay to find anything they want [and no more room to put it all]) has driven prices down to levels I've never seen before since following them since 1986.
Another factor is collectors passing on, their heirs not wanting the stuff and then flooding the market with it; and finally, with the younger generation often being more of a disposable IKEA generation and just plain not interested for the most part.
It's a great buyer's market. Awful for sellers.