BQ 86831 - Countess von Hohenlohe

[wryness]

Ooh, ooh! I was at this lecture and the story's amazing. I won't get all the details right (just working from memory here), but here's the gist of it. It's (mostly?) true, even if it sounds like a soap opera or something:

Countess Adelheid von Hohenlohe lived with her family in Germany*. Her father was blind and when she was a girl, he would play this little game with her where he would bring her an object (like a porcelain teacup or a statuette) and she would have to guess where and when it was made. This seemed impossible at first, but the more they played the game, the more her father taught her to pay attention to seemingly insignificant details about the glaze, the patterns, tiny marks underneath, etc. Countess von Hohenlohe never thought much of this...but then, BAM! Political instability! (Was it WWII? I think it might have been.) Her father died and she and her mother fled the country, eventually ending up as refugees in the United States (in California, I think?) with barely a penny to their name. One of the only things they were able to bring was the family silverware, but they had to sell it to get by.

One day the Countess was in a thrift shop just looking for basic things the family needed, and in the knick-knack section, she saw an unimportant-looking teacup that she immediately recognized as being of European origin. She bought it for a pittance and then took it to someone who knew its true worth (I suppose an antiques appraiser) who bought it for a significantly larger amount of money.

The Countess realized that many important crafted pieces could be similarly sold at thrift shops, so she began scouring stores for them and was very successful at selling them back. She basically recouped her fortune, or a lot of it, by becoming an antiques dealer. (She actually got to the point where she was able to afford some sort of penthouse, which I believe was where Dr. Sowell visited her.) Dr. Sowell made some interesting connections with this story to gospel topics, including the fact that each person has inestimable divine worth.

AND THIS WAS A COOL AND SAD THING. Apparently when she was in Utah (at a D.I., I think), the Countess von Hohenlohe saw a (porcelain?) sculpture of a deer that she immediately recognized as being an incredibly expensive piece by some Danish master. How did it end up in Utah? She assumed it was probably painstakingly transported by some Danish pioneer family across the ocean and then carted all the way across the plains (without getting broken!) until it ended up several generations later with some Utah descendant who didn't comprehend its significance and threw it away.

Antiques Roadshow is real, people. Also, we are not teacups, and we were *all* made by a master and are awesome (in different ways) and should never discount our worth. As I saw Lindsey Stirling quote recently: "Admire someone else's beauty without questioning your own."

*Or the Czech Republic or something. It might have been Norway instead of Denmark, too. Somewhere in Europe, though!

[LadyDoomfiyah]

breaking my only lurk, never ever ever post rule to say THANK YOU SO MUCH, WRYNESS!!! The odds of me emailing Dr. Sowell are...tiny, so thanks for this wonderful summary. You clearly remember more than I do about this, but it all sounds right. You're the best.