I was sorting through a box lot of disparate items recently, not sure what I would find of value or interest. I removed item after item, fingering them carefully, and finally came upon a small swan with a few smudges on its molded feathers.
For some reason, I like swans. I remember buying two ceramic ones some years ago on sale at Barneys New York (they were the only things I could afford in the department store). They are still sitting on a pass-through counter in my dining room, filled with pens and paperclips and small items.
This swan at auction was a sweet little porcelain figurine, not a nick or scratch on it. Its eyes and its snip of a nose were painted black, and its beak a soft orange. Its long neck and body were flawless, which was surprising for an item placed in the bottom of a cardboard box.
Nothing about it seemed familiar – it looked like many of the other small items I’ve retrieved from box lots – until I turned it over on the bottom to look for a maker. There I found a name that I recognized:
“L. Ispanky,” the name signed in ink.
Are you kidding me? Two weeks ago, I had not even heard of the artist Laszlo Ispanky, and now I was holding one of his figurines in my hand. It was an unreal moment.
The words “A Special Limited Edition” and “November 16, 1975” formed a circle on the bottom, along with Ispanky’s trademark buffalo and his stamped signature beneath it. The figurine did not have the polished appearance of the Barney porcelains; its finish was described by several retail sites as bisque unglazed porcelain.
I wrote a blog post about Ispanky and his bronze sculptures after coming across several of them at an auction house I was visiting for the first time in several years. They had been placed in the back of the main room – an impressive array of men and women, warriors, winged horses and mythical gods. A regular at the auction house suspected that they’d be sold through a major New York auction house.
A famous sculptor and artist, Ispanky emigrated to the United States from Hungary in the 1950s, and started out making porcelains for another company before opening his own shop in the 1960s. He was said to have produced his first limited edition pieces in 1966. He made porcelains for both Goebel and Lenox, but some of his major and most important works are in bronze. His artworks are in museums around the world.
The swan at auction was a small piece, measuring 5″ from head to beak and 2 ½” tall. It was a limited edition figurine, and as such may not be very valuable. It was identified as special, perhaps, because of the artist’s signature and the quantity made. One website identified it as a Goebel/Hummel figurine.
I found several with the Ispanky green trademark stamp selling on the web for less than $20. The retail sites mentioned that the pieces were signed when they seemed to be actually stamped.
A figurine of a seated girl with flowers that bore his actual signature sold at an auction for $70. That one had a small break on her scarf that had been repaired. Here are auction prices and replacement prices for some of his more expensive porcelain pieces.
The price, though, wasn’t the prize for me. It was stumbling upon a work by an artist whose name I did not recognize a month ago. Auctions are indeed a place of discovery.
