Yesterday we went to an antique mall in northern Indiana, quite large, very well kept, well lit. Everything to like, except for few dealers that had obvious reproductions. One dealer had a stack of bad pink Recollection aka reproduction Madrid plates and two others had Whitehall labeled as Fostoria American.
Realize that most dealers are honest and wrongly identify pieces due to ignorance or honest mistakes. Realize too that the burden of knowing your glass and buying wisely rest on your shoulders; the customer has very little recourse in most antique shops for misidentified glass.
Fostoria Glass American Crystal Flared Nappy
I am not an expert in Fostoria American and if you like this pattern and intend to collect it, I recommend doing as much research as possible. Know the pieces Fostoria made and know those they did not make. Also learn the pieces that are rare and highly sought after (also known as expensive!) so if you see one stuck in a box lot somewhere you can enjoy a bargain.
There are a few tell-tale signs that make it easy to spot some Whitehall pieces. First, Fostoria American is high quality, sparkling crystal. Whitehall is not bad glass, most of it is moderate quality so it can be hard to spot “lower quality” if you don’t have a “high quality” piece to compare. But some of the later Whitehall is pretty bad, and you’ll soon recognize the difference between Fostoria and lookalikes by the glass clarity and feel.
Real Fostoria flat bottom bowls will have ground base rims, while the one I saw yesterday had a regular molded bottom, easy to spot.
This next piece seems to trip up a lot of people. It’s a neat looking piece, a two part candle holder, and I’ve seen these many times, in fact we got one in a box lot once that just wasn’t quite a Fostoria level piece. The quality seems to vary from quite good to really low end junky glass.
We saw this next piece yesterday, another candle holder, although not as common in this area as the hurricane. Take a good look at the little peg feet on this candle holder as that’s another giveaway that tells you this is Whitehall.
The pieces you’re most likely to see wrongly labeled are crystal bowls, tumblers, pitchers and candle holders. Sadly some people still get fooled by the colored tumbler sets in pink, blue, amber, green and smoke gray. Fostoria did make a few pieces of colored American but the quality is exceptional and the colors are very different. Whitehall colors are typical of the 1960s – avocado green, deep blue with a grayish greenish tint, peachy pink – while Fostoria’s colors are typical of their other colored glass.
I don’t want to scare anyone into thinking you are surrounded by reproduction glass every time you step into an antique mall. Most of the glass I saw was identified correctly, or with generic terms like “pink depression plate”. Most of the reproduction glass is easy to spot once you have seen the real stuff and you’ll gain confidence every time you shop for glass, pick it up, feel it, get a sense for the quality and designs and shapes.
Merry Christmas!