Beginning collectors confidently name every piece of pottery they encounter. They remember seeing it in a book, or maybe some expert at a flea market once told them that some piece they sold looked like it, or, maybe, they just know everything there is to know about pottery because - well, because they just DO. Isn't any unpainted piece of pottery from the Thirties to the Fifties and aren't all unmarked cookie jars McCoy by default? And the ones that aren't McCoy have to be Shawnee! Isn't every planter without maker's marks made by Brush if it isn't McCoy, and aren't Brush and McCoy the same thing, anyway?

We've all met "authorities" that think so.

It takes time and a level of knowledge to look at something and honestly admit not only that you don't have a clue as to what it is, you don't even think you can venture a guess in a general direction. And that it's time to go back to the books. And to hope you get lucky and someday figure it out. But even if you think you've gotten it, you'll still ask others and check out the new books just to confirm you were right.

The Second Mystery Lady

It was a miserable, hot afternoon in a New Jersey August. The blacktop parking lot of a local high school was emptying out, with vendors looking on forlornly on the sparse crowd. It was early, but some were already packing up, disgusted with the heat and the lack of buyers. I would walk past a table and people either jumped up in hopeful anticipation of a sale, or they'd just sit there, too hot and tired to move. The picking's were getting pretty lean. One guy had tables full of old tools, and, pushed aside like an afterthought, some household junk in a couple of boxes at one end. Something white caught my eye. I picked it up, getting filthy in the process. It was a very dirty figure of a girl, holding out her apron intended to look as if carrying an apron full of flowers when the vase was in use.

The first thing I noticed was that there was some kind of lifted glaze on her front, a place where the glaze or the body had shrunken differently in the firing and pulled a flap-like chunk away from the body of the figure. Under the lines of dirt, she was very heavily crazed. But she was in the "right" style, so I asked her price. The guy behind the table wasn't sure. "We're cleaning a bunch a stuff out of the house" was the explanation. He walked over to an older man behind the table, and came back. "Five dollars". I offered him four. With a wave of disgust, he said ok, and handed her to me, without even a paper bag.

It was so filthy, I worried about getting my car's rug dirty when I laid her on the floor for the ride home. When I got home, I put her in a basin filled with dish detergent, and left her to soak for a few hours. There was a layer of "stuff" floating in the basin, and she only looked a little better. I bought out the Clorox and left her to soak again, figuring I had nothing much to lose. (This is not the way to treat old pottery, but she was beyond hope otherwise!)

The next morning, it was almost a different figure. Whatever was under her skin, the beach had done a nearly complete job of eliminating it. She was white, just a few stubborn veins of black here and there. A third overnight soaking, and she was about as clean as I could hope to get her. I dried her off and put her on a shelf, and forgot about her.

Something in a book on Cowen made me look her over once again. One quick glance and I knew she was clearly not Cowen. The clay was all wrong. The glaze was all wrong. But, like most beginners, I was hoping to ignore the obvious in search of the implausible. Then, looking very closely at the round pillar on her side, I realized what I thought was just more casting flaws was the faint mark of a copyright symbol on the back, near the base. Under that, what looked like an "OPco" or "OPc". The underside of the base was marked only USA, and there was what looked like a smudge in the clay. Nothing else

So much for my great Cowen find.

One time when I turned her over to check her out for something I might have missed, I made an accidental discovery. Holding her with one hand to flip her, I noticed my fingers seemed to fit into the ripples on the back of the base. When I turned her, I realized the smudge on the bottom was a thumbprint. She had been taken out of her casting mold or moved by some unknown hand, and they had left their mark in her still soft clay.

But what does that mean? Was she a test piece that didn't work out, her glazing problems proof of that? Was she some unskilled workman's learning project? Was she from a mass producer who didn't care about quality? Her thin arms would have resulted in a lot of breakage. Was she a second? Her USA mark eliminated only my brief thought that she might have been from some hobbyist's casting - marked like that, she's the product of a commercial pottery.

Adding fuel to my speculation over the years was the discovery that Guy Cowen went to work for the Onondaga Pottery Co. (part of the Syracuse Pottery) after the closing of his pottery. Could she be a sort of never produced sample from his era? Nothing I've ever seen from there looks like this. I have never seen another like her anywhere in all the years I've owned her. I have jumped on every reference that I've seen for potteries that might be the OPC(o) of her mark, and have noted that one of the known marks for Onondaga does contain an OPco mark, but I have never seen her mark attributed specifically to them. There is nothing else similar that I have been able to find in my research. For the curious, her body is of a very slightly course cream white and her glaze is clear and very, very thick and glossy, resin-like and pooled in places. She was not well cleaned from the slip mold, and there are faint traces of mold lines, as well as dots and dimples in areas of detail. And the well-defined thumbprint in her base.

I'm baffled. Whatever she is, she's unique in her design. She's pretty, even with all her blemishes, and I enjoy her as she is. But I would love to know how she got to that flea market, and the story of her travels. She's clearly a girl who's been around. And she knows how to keep a secret.

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Information? Questions? Send me email by clicking here (evelynmch@aol.com).Please note that I can not price or evaluate pottery for you, but I do love to talk with other collectors