Good Advice Pays Off

Years ago, a hobby friend gave me some advice about scouring antique shops and thrift stores for pieces to add to my collection. She told me to always be sure to look on the bottom shelves. The middle shelves are where most people look; few look up or down.  When I did as she suggested recently, this is what I found.

Not one, but two bisque warmbloods!

They are by Goebel and were made in 1969. No chips, no breaks, and languishing on a bottom shelf among an assortment of old tools and junk. 

At only $20 each, I brought them home. I didn't plan to keep them; I just wanted to get them into the hands of collectors who would appreciate them. So, I posted their photos to a couple of online china groups on Facebook and offered them at cost plus shipping. They were sold in just a few of hours.

One is now in Kentucky with a long time hobby friend and the other went to a collector in North Carolina. I am especially glad that my friend got one of them. She had saved her babysitting money as a girl to buy this piece, and then in the late 1970s, someone broke into her storage unit and stole it. She was thrilled to have it again in her collection.

Looking down low at those bottom shelves was good advice!

How Old is My Goebel?

One of the most important features in collectibility showing or in dating how old a piece might be is the stamp or sticker that comes with the model.

After a recent discussion on one of the Facebook clinky pages about how to determine the age of a Goebel piece, I decided to pull out my Goebel Shetland Pony  and see what I could learn about it.

 The pony was terribly hard to photograph as it is heavily glossed

 and that gloss reflects any and all light.

But I was able to get a good shot of the stamp on its belly, the key to figuring out when my piece was produced.

Photo from MI Hummel Porcelain Factory Marks and History Reference Guide. Downloaded with permission.

There it is! On the bottom, second from the left. My Shetland Pony was made sometime during 1972 - 1979, so it is forty to forty-seven years old.

Further reading on the web site says that you can narrow down the time period even further. If the mark is under the glaze (like mine), then the piece was made from 1972 - 1976, and if it is over the glaze, then it can be dated to 1976 - 1979. The color of the stamp may also be useful in determining age, although I could not find any reference to the color of this particular stamp having varied.

As a child that I used to pull all the stickers off my china pieces and the blue ribbon stickers off of my Breyers. Oh, how I wish I had not done that now! Stamps on a piece, however, be it one like the Goebel stamps above or a numbering system used by Lefton and other manufacturers, are better than stickers as they are a permanent part of the piece and cannot be removed.