I'm A Little Teapot, Short & Stout...

A man buys a blue and white teapot.

(If you're thinking Blue Willow, I was, too. My Christmas present from Brother Dear, during the last year of high school, was a four-place setting of this pretty stuff. I still have most of the plates and saucers. Love it.)

Blue Willow plate - from Wikipedia

Anyways, a man found this cracked teapot, no top, at an antiques fair in Great Britain. He thought it might be something interesting, so put it up for auction. He paid about $20. The pre-auction estimate was $20,000!!  (Some English antique dealer is kicking themselves right now.)

Photo from Woolley and Wallis

Sounds great, right? 

The piece sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for:

                        $520,000.

More than $800,000, if you count the buyer's premium -- and more than 20 times the appraiser's estimate. (Shame on them.... though I'd guess this piece was so rare that they had few 'comps' to compare it with.)

 That'll buy a lot of English Breakfast and biscuits. 

According to Tamzin Corbett, auctioneers rep for Woollery & Wallis (the Salisbury, Southern England auction that sold the piece), the teapot was manufactured by the John Bartlam porcelain factory -- the first known American porcelain company -- in Cain Hoy, SC in the 1760s. She says, "It's only the seventh known piece from this pottery that's been discovered and although it's not whole, it is still recognizable as an object."

One wonders how a South Carolina teapot from the Revolutionary War period even made it overseas. (Swiped by a soldier, perhaps?) The dealer, Roy Jellicoe, who purchased it on behalf of the Met, says: "There was great interest in the piece because it's so rare...just before the Revolutionary War, there was a non-importation agreement in place...if [the colonies] could make their own porcelain, they didn't need to import it from England."

And that, along with taxes, insults and condescension, are strong reasons why the American Revolution happened, in the first place.

        "The Americans thought it [the teapot] shouldn't be over here," says Mr. Jellicoe.

Apparently echoes of pride and rebellion are still going strong. Those pesky Americans...