Urban Art Antiques, Antiques Mysteries and Great Paintings

For much of the twentieth century, Americans ate from remarkably similar dinnerware whether they were enjoying breakfast in a roadside diner, lunch aboard a railroad dining car, dinner in a grand hotel, or a meal in a hospital cafeteria. Behind those plates and coffee cups stood a handful of American manufacturers whose products became the standard for commercial food service.

Unlike delicate porcelain intended for display, restaurant china was built to work. Made from vitrified china or semi-porcelain, it was designed to resist chipping, survive industrial dishwashers, and withstand years of constant use. While millions of pieces were produced, much of this dinnerware was discarded as restaurants modernized, making surviving examples surprisingly collectible today.

Here are the companies that built America’s restaurant tables.

Founded in Buffalo, New York, as Buffalo Pottery in 1901, the company gradually shifted its focus from art pottery to commercial dinnerware. In 1956 it officially became Buffalo China, reflecting its dominance in the institutional china market.

Buffalo supplied restaurants, hotels, railroads, military facilities, hospitals, and schools throughout the United States. Its china appeared aboard the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, the Union Pacific Railroad, and numerous other passenger railroads during the golden age of dining cars. Luxury destinations including The Greenbrier in West Virginia and The Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park also commissioned Buffalo ware, as did the U.S. Navy and many government institutions.

Collectors appreciate Buffalo China for its durability, clean designs, and the wide variety of custom backstamps bearing the names of hotels, restaurants, and railroads.

Founded as the Onondaga Pottery Company in Syracuse, New York, Syracuse China became one of America’s premier manufacturers of commercial dinnerware. The company earned a reputation for combining durability with elegant design, making it a favorite of luxury hotels and first-class dining rooms.

Its customers included the Waldorf Astoria, The Plaza Hotel, numerous Pullman dining cars, and major passenger railroads. During the Jet Age, Syracuse China also produced dinnerware for airlines, including Eastern Air Lines, United Air Lines, American Airlines, and other commercial carriers seeking attractive yet durable in-flight service.

The company also embraced modern design, producing patterns by industrial designers such as Russel Wright. Today, Syracuse remains one of the most sought-after names in restaurant china collecting.

Founded in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Shenango China specialized almost exclusively in commercial food service. While many manufacturers balanced retail and institutional production, Shenango built its reputation supplying restaurants, hotels, railroads, schools, and government agencies.

Its dinnerware appeared aboard several passenger railroads and in hotel dining rooms throughout the country. Shenango also produced china for military contracts during both World Wars and later became known for manufacturing pieces used in the White House and other government facilities through affiliated lines.

Collectors often encounter Shenango pieces with custom restaurant logos, hotel names, and institutional backstamps, making the company a favorite among those interested in American dining history.

Founded in 1871 in Newell, West Virginia, Homer Laughlin is one of the last great survivors of America’s commercial china industry.

Although best known today for Fiesta dinnerware, Homer Laughlin has supplied restaurants, diners, hospitals, schools, military dining facilities, and institutional cafeterias for well over a century. Unlike many of its competitors, the company successfully balanced consumer dinnerware with commercial production, allowing it to remain in business while many rivals disappeared.

Because Homer Laughlin documented its production so thoroughly, many of its restaurant pieces can be dated quite accurately using factory backstamps and date codes.

Operating in the Syracuse, New York, area, Iroquois distinguished itself by bringing modern industrial design to commercial dinnerware.

The company worked with celebrated designers including Russel Wright and Ben Seibel, producing restaurant and hotel china that reflected changing American tastes after World War II. Its products appeared in hotels, restaurants, institutional dining rooms, and airline service while introducing cleaner, more contemporary forms to commercial table settings.

Although the company closed in 1969, Iroquois remains highly respected among collectors of mid-century modern design.

Founded in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, Mayer China focused on institutional dining rather than luxury hospitality. Its durable products served schools, universities, hospitals, factories, and large corporate cafeterias where reliability mattered more than elaborate decoration.

While Mayer seldom produced the highly customized hotel china that attracts some collectors, it became an important supplier to educational and industrial food service operations throughout the twentieth century. The company gradually disappeared through mergers and industry consolidation during the 1990s.

Based in Vernon, California, Wallace China helped furnish the rapidly expanding hospitality industry of the American West.

Its products were found in California hotels, roadside restaurants, coffee shops, and regional railroad dining services during the postwar travel boom. Wallace became particularly well known for colorful mid-century designs that reflected Southern California’s optimistic, modern aesthetic.

Today, Wallace pieces are especially popular among collectors of West Coast restaurant memorabilia and mid-century design.

The Technical Porcelain and Chinaware Company, better known simply as TEPCO, operated in El Cerrito, California, and became one of the defining names in West Coast restaurant china.

TEPCO supplied diners, cafeterias, schools, hotels, and military facilities throughout the western United States. It is perhaps best remembered for its close association with Chinese-American restaurants, particularly in California, where countless family-owned establishments ordered customized TEPCO dinnerware bearing their own names and logos.

Because many of these restaurants have disappeared, surviving TEPCO pieces have become an important record of Chinese-American culinary history.

Located in Falls Creek, Pennsylvania, Jackson China produced durable vitrified dinnerware for restaurants, cafeterias, hospitals, and institutional kitchens across the country.

Although it never achieved the national recognition of Buffalo or Syracuse, Jackson earned a reputation for dependable commercial china that could withstand years of heavy use. Today, collectors most often encounter Jackson pieces bearing the names of regional restaurants, schools, hospitals, and hotels, offering a glimpse into local dining history.

One of the pleasures of collecting restaurant ware is that every piece tells a story.

The easiest way to identify a piece is by its backstamp, which usually identifies the manufacturer and sometimes the customer. Restaurant names, hotel logos, railroad heralds, airline insignias, military markings, and university seals can often narrow a piece to a particular period or location.

Collectors also pay close attention to pattern names, shape numbers, and company trademarks. For example, Buffalo pieces marked “Buffalo Pottery” predate the company’s 1956 name change, while Homer Laughlin’s factory date codes can often identify the exact year—and sometimes even the month—a piece was produced.

Custom china made for famous railroads, luxury hotels, early airlines, national parks, or long-closed restaurants is often especially desirable because it preserves a tangible piece of American history.

Restaurant china was never intended to become collectible. It was designed to be practical, affordable, and nearly indestructible.

Yet these sturdy plates and cups have become some of the most evocative artifacts of twentieth-century America. They recall the elegance of railroad dining cars, the glamour of grand hotels, the optimism of early air travel, and the countless neighborhood diners where generations gathered over coffee and pie.

For collectors, every backstamp is more than a maker’s mark. It is a connection to the places Americans traveled, the meals they shared, and the companies that quietly helped define everyday life.

Some mysteries survive because no one can solve them. Others survive because every generation invents a new answer.

In the summer of 1872, laborers digging near the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire uncovered a small, polished stone unlike anything anyone had seen before. About the size of an egg, it was covered with strange symbols, a haunting carved face, and two perfectly drilled holes running through its center.

Almost immediately, the questions began.

Who made it? How old was it? And why did it look so unlike any known Native American artifact?

As word spread, the object became known simply as the “Mystery Stone.” It was displayed in a local bank, where curious visitors, scholars, ministers, and amateur historians all offered competing theories. Was it left behind by Vikings? Carved by a lost civilization? A ceremonial object? A memorial? Or something else entirely?

The more people studied it, the stranger it seemed.

Later researchers pointed to clues suggesting it might not be ancient after all. The remarkably smooth finish and precision-drilled holes appeared more consistent with nineteenth-century technology than with prehistoric craftsmanship. If that was true, then another mystery emerged: who created it, and why?

Our latest episode of Antiques Mysteries explores not only the stone itself, but the remarkable moment in American history that allowed it to capture the nation’s imagination. In the decades after the Civil War, Americans longed for evidence that their young country possessed ancient secrets equal to those of Europe. The Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone arrived at exactly the right time.

More than 150 years later, the object remains on display at the New Hampshire Historical Society. Whether it is an authentic relic, an elaborate hoax, or something in between, its greatest power may be that it still refuses to provide a final answer.

Sometimes the mystery is the artifact.

Listen to the latest episode of Antiques Mysteries and decide for yourself.

With America approaching its 250th birthday, you’d think there might be an uptick in interest in historical portraits. If there is, it wasn’t reflected in this recent sale.

A large, signed 1853 oil portrait by Bass Otis, depicting Thomas Amory II, after John Singleton Copley, sold for just $550 including buyer’s premium. That’s for a mid-19th-century American portrait by a historically significant artist.

Today, copying another artist might sound like something secondary or derivative. In the early 1800s, it was almost the opposite.

Artists like Bass Otis were trained in a tradition where copying was a legitimate part of the craft. It was how you studied composition and how you learned from the masters.

And Copley was not just any earlier painter, he was the standard. For American portrait artists of Otis’s generation, Copley represented the peak of colonial painting.

Now held at the National Gallery of Art, Copley’s original portrait of Thomas Amory II, painted around the early 1770s, is a classic of colonial American portraiture. Amory appears composed and self-possessed, standing in a restrained interior space, rendered with extraordinary attention to texture and psychological presence.

So when Otis made a copy eighty years after the original, he wasn’t simply reproducing an image. He was engaging directly with the most respected visual language of early American portraiture.

There’s also a practical side to it. By the 1850s, there was real demand for historical portraits, especially among family members who wanted images of important ancestors but didn’t own the originals. A painted copy by a known artist was the closest thing to recovering that lost history.

Thomas Amory II was a wealthy Boston merchant, part of the commercial elite of colonial New England. Families like his cared deeply about legacy, lineage, and visual memory. Portraits weren’t decoration, they were identity.

The original Copley painting captured that identity at its peak. But copies like Otis’s allowed that image to circulate across generations, branches of a family, or even historical societies.

What makes this particular copy especially interesting is that when Otis painted it in 1853, Copley’s original portrait was still in private hands. In fact, the painting remained with descendants of the Amory family for more than two centuries and did not enter a museum collection, the Corcoran, until 1989.

Otis may have had direct access to the original portrait through the family or its descendants rather than working from an engraving or another reproduction. Whether commissioned by the Amory family or by someone connected to them, the copy suggests a continuing desire to preserve and share an image that had become part of the family’s historical identity.

In a pre-photography world, that mattered. A copy wasn’t a downgrade, it was access.

Even today, the appeal isn’t really about rarity. It’s about connection: to Copley, to colonial Boston, and to the idea of preserving a face from early American history.

That connection is particularly interesting as the United States marks its 250th anniversary. Americans have periodically looked back to the colonial era to rediscover their national story, and those moments have often influenced what people collect. The most obvious example came during the Bicentennial in 1976, when interest in Americana surged. Colonial furniture, folk art, historical portraits, and Revolutionary-era objects were actively sought by collectors and museums alike. This follows through and beyond the accession date of the Copley portrait in 1989.

Many categories of Americana have never fully recovered those inflation-adjusted highs. Today portraits of long-forgotten merchants and civic leaders appeal to a smaller audience. 

Still, Bass Otis himself is one of those figures who should probably be better known than he is. 

Born in 1784, he became a major portrait painter in Philadelphia and worked in a period when American art was still defining itself. He’s also credited with producing what is often described as the first American lithograph in 1819.

Yet Otis sits between eras. He comes after the founding generation of American portrait painting, but before the modern art world that canonized a few key names. Artists like him are historically important, but market recognition hasn’t kept pace with that importance.

That gap shows up clearly in prices like this one, which actually outperforms many recent records for the artist.

To a general audience, this painting may look like several layers removed from significance: a copy of a portrait, by a second-tier artist, depicting a man few people remember. To an art historian, it’s something more interesting: a physical record of how one generation of Americans looked back at its colonial past, preserving an eighteenth-century image for nineteenth-century descendants and, ultimately, for us.

In that sense, the painting tells two stories at once. It preserves the image of a colonial merchant painted by Copley in the eighteenth century, and it reveals how nineteenth-century Americans chose to remember that world. 

Today, the painting serves as a reminder that historical importance and market value are not always the same thing. A Bass Otis copy of a Copley portrait may not excite today’s collectors the way it did earlier generations, but it still embodies two centuries of Americans looking back at their own history. For $550, someone didn’t just buy a portrait. They bought a piece of that conversation.

The post outlines multiple art exhibitions in Portland galleries, including Russo Lee Gallery, Augen Gallery, Froelick Gallery, Blue Sky Gallery, and more, each hosting receptions at various times. A suggested walking route encourages visitors to explore these galleries efficiently.

1. Russo Lee Gallery
Exhibition: Offerings From The Secondary Market
Reception: 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Address: 805 NW 21st Avenue, Portland, OR 97209
Website: russoleegallery.com

2. Augen Gallery
Exhibition: Arles Day + Summer Group Exhibition
Reception: 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Address: 716 NW Davis Street, Portland, OR 97209
Website: augengallery.com

3. Froelick Gallery
Exhibition: Rebecca Boraz continues
Reception: 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Address: 714 NW Davis Street, Portland, OR 97209
Website: froelickgallery.com

4. Blue Sky Gallery
Exhibitions: Blue Sky 2015 – 2025: The Fifth Decade
Reception: 5:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Address: 122 NW 8th Avenue, Portland, OR 97209
Website: blueskygallery.org

5. Blackfish Gallery
Exhibitions: Merridawn Duckler, Libby Wadsworth and Anastasiya Gutnik
Reception: 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Address: 938 NW Everett Street, Portland, OR 97209
Website: blackfish.com

6. Gallery 114
Exhibitions: Member Show
Reception: 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Address: 1100 NW Glisan Street, Portland, OR 97209
Website: gallery114.com

7. Elizabeth Leach Gallery
Exhibition: Let’s Play: Group Exhibition
Reception: 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Address: 417 NW 9th Avenue, Portland, OR 97209
Website: elizabethleach.com

8. Waterstone Gallery
Exhibitions: “Transformations” hybrid exhibition of both invited and juried ceramic works.
Reception: 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Address: 124 NW 9th Avenue, Portland, OR 97209
Website: waterstonegallery.com

To make the most of your evening, here’s a recommended walking route starting from the northernmost gallery and moving southward. You’d have to be really fast to see them all, so looking at the websites ahead of time and leaving the ones that stay open later to last is also a potential strategy.

Making time for it won’t be easy, but admission is free at the Portland Art Museum.

Please note: First Thursday galleries are numbered in blue.

This route covers approximately 1.5 miles and allows you to experience a diverse range of exhibitions. Be sure to check each gallery’s website for any updates or changes to event details.

Enjoy your art-filled evening in Portland! Know of something else going on? Leave a comment!

Nineteen seventy-six is a year remembered well. While most years cannot be tied to a specific memory, America’s Bicentennial is connected to the experiences of many who grew up during the era. The celebration seemed to touch everything. There were special soda cans, cereal boxes, parades, speeches, coins, and commemorative products of every description.

I do not remember most of those things firsthand. I don’t recall the patriotic advertising campaigns or the endless red, white, and blue packaging. But I know it was Christmas 1976 when I arrived at my grandmother’s house and found a Bicentennial train set circling the tree.

That train was one of many toys that came and went during childhood, but it is perhaps the only one I can tie to a specific year. It remains the reason I have a fondness for Bicentennial collectibles today. Recently, while wandering through an antique mall, a Bicentennial decanter caught my eye. It sat quietly on a shelf with a $25 price tag attached. Had the Old Grand-Dad whiskey still been inside, the value might have exceeded $500. Empty, it was simply another relic from a year when America seemed determined to commemorate itself.

My other vivid memory from that time may be from the spring of 1976 or 1977. My grandmother had saved Bicentennial quarters and tucked them into plastic Easter eggs. The special reverse design featuring a colonial drummer made them seem different from ordinary coins. To a child, they felt like treasure. Some of those quarters are still in circulation today. They remain worth twenty-five cents, although inflation has reduced what that quarter can buy.

The train set itself was hardly unusual. A Tyco HO-scale Bicentennial train set, such as the popular Spirit of America set, typically retailed for between thirty and sixty dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that would be roughly equivalent to $175 to $350 today. Interestingly, the locomotive alone can now sell for $80 to $200 on the collector market. Like many collectibles, nostalgia often proves more valuable than inflation.

What makes Bicentennial memorabilia fascinating is its sheer scale. Americans did not simply celebrate the nation’s two-hundredth birthday. They purchased it. Manufacturers released commemorative watches, toys, stamps, automobiles, and household goods. Eagle-themed wall hangings appeared in living rooms. Needlework samplers and patriotic quilts decorated homes. Colonial revival furniture enjoyed renewed popularity. Bicentennial clocks ticked away on mantels across the country.

Looking back, the Bicentennial may have been America’s first truly modern collectible craze. Previous generations collected stamps, coins, and souvenirs, but the Bicentennial transformed nearly every consumer product into a potential keepsake. Companies encouraged Americans to save what they bought because one day it might become valuable. Millions did exactly that.

The irony, of course, is that so many people preserved these items that most never became particularly rare. Antique malls today are filled with commemorative plates, mugs, decanters, bells, and countless other Bicentennial objects. Most remain affordable. Their value lies less in scarcity than in what they represent.

For those who remember 1976, these objects are reminders of a unique moment when the entire country paused to celebrate a milestone. For those who came later, they offer a glimpse into how Americans viewed their own history at the nation’s two-hundredth birthday.

And every now and then, among the shelves of an antique mall, one of those objects still has the power to stop us in our tracks. For me, it is usually a train painted in red, white, and blue, forever circling a Christmas tree in 1976.

Tyco “Spirit of America” Train Sets
Manufacturer: Tyco Industries
Notes: Among the most recognizable Bicentennial train sets. Complete boxed sets command the highest prices, but locomotives alone remain popular with collectors. Original packaging can significantly increase value.

Lionel Bicentennial Locomotives and Cars
Manufacturer: Lionel
Notes: Lionel produced several patriotic-themed pieces in O gauge. Look for original boxes and limited-production items.

Bicentennial Quarters, Half Dollars, and Dollars
Manufacturer: United States Mint
Notes: Circulated examples remain common, but silver-clad proof sets and unopened mint sets are more desirable. Many people saved them, so condition matters.

Old Grand-Dad Bicentennial Decanters
Manufacturer: National Distillers
Notes: Empty examples are common. Unopened examples containing the original whiskey can bring substantially higher prices, depending on condition and provenance.

Jim Beam Bicentennial Bottles
Manufacturer: Jim Beam
Notes: One of the most prolific producers of commemorative decanters. Most empty examples are modestly priced, but unusual forms, limited editions, and sealed examples can be worth seeking out.

Avon Bicentennial Collectibles
Manufacturer: Avon
Notes: Produced everything from plates and bells to bottles and glassware. These remain plentiful but are excellent examples of how extensively the Bicentennial reached American households.

Coca-Cola Bicentennial Advertising
Manufacturer: Coca-Cola
Notes: Trays, glasses, signs, and special packaging remain popular. Store displays and advertising signs generally attract more collector interest than common commemorative glasses.

Bicentennial Watches
Manufacturers: Timex, Bulova, Elgin and others
Notes: Many were produced as commemorative gifts or promotional items. Original boxes and paperwork increase desirability.

United States Postal Service Bicentennial Stamp Sets
Manufacturer: U.S. Postal Service
Notes: First-day covers, commemorative stamp albums, and postal souvenirs remain affordable and are often found at estate sales.

Bicentennial Board Games and Toys
Manufacturers: Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley and others
Notes: Educational games, puzzles, and patriotic-themed toys are less commonly encountered today than many ceramic collectibles.

Railroad Bicentennial Memorabilia
Manufacturers: Various railroads including Chessie System, Seaboard Coast Line, and others
Notes: Railroads embraced the Bicentennial with special paint schemes and promotional merchandise. Calendars, posters, employee items, and model railroad versions often have strong collector followings.

Bicentennial Glassware
Manufacturers: Federal Glass, Libbey, Indiana Glass and others
Notes: Mugs, tumblers, and commemorative glasses are common but visually appealing. Sets and unusual designs are worth a closer look.

Colonial Revival Home Decor
Manufacturers: Numerous furniture and decorative arts companies
Notes: Eagle wall hangings, brass accessories, clocks, and patriotic decor were popular during the Bicentennial era. These pieces often blend into general Americana and can sometimes be overlooked by collectors.

Local and Regional Bicentennial Souvenirs
Manufacturers: Local historical societies, chambers of commerce, and civic groups
Notes: Often produced in small quantities for local celebrations. These can be far scarcer than nationally distributed collectibles and are frequently the most interesting finds.

Collector Tip: The Bicentennial’s greatest irony is that millions of Americans purchased and preserved commemorative items because they believed they would become valuable. As a result, many survive in large numbers today. The most desirable pieces are often not the ones people carefully stored away, but the advertising displays, local souvenirs, promotional items, and everyday objects that were used, enjoyed, and eventually discarded.

There are paintings we admire, and there are paintings that linger.

Most of us know the experience. You walk through a museum, passing dozens of works that reveal themselves immediately. A portrait is a portrait. A landscape is a landscape. You understand what you’re seeing, perhaps even appreciate it, and then you move on.

But every so often, a painting refuses to let go.

Not because it is dramatic. Not because it is famous. Sometimes the works that stay with us are the quiet ones. The ones that seem simple at first glance, yet become stranger the longer we look. They ask for nothing from us except attention, and in return they begin to change. Or perhaps they reveal that we are the ones changing.

George Inness painted landscapes during a period when American art was increasingly concerned with observation, description, and the visible world. Yet his greatest works often seem less interested in showing us a place than in creating an experience. They occupy a curious territory between certainty and suggestion, where forms emerge only to disappear, where atmosphere becomes as important as solid ground, and where the act of looking becomes part of the subject itself.

This episode begins with a single painting and a memory of standing before it years ago. What appeared at first to be an ordinary landscape gradually became something harder to define. Not a puzzle to solve, but a sensation to inhabit. A feeling that the scene contained more than it was willing to show. More than paint. More than trees, sky, and distance.

From that encounter, we’ll explore a question that runs through some of Inness’s most remarkable paintings: Why do these landscapes feel inhabited even when no one is there? Why do they seem to generate the presence of figures, emotions, and memories that never fully materialize? And what does that tell us about the way Inness understood both painting and perception?

Because in the end, this is not simply a story about landscapes. It’s a story about uncertainty, imagination, and the strange space between what a painting contains and what a viewer brings to it. A place where atmosphere becomes meaning, where absence can feel like presence, and where a quiet patch of paint can leave an impression that lasts for years.

In a quiet gallery, a painting hangs motionless on the wall. Yet for some viewers, it never feels still. Colors pulse. Shapes vibrate. A swirl of yellow seems to ring like brass, while deep blues hum like distant strings. The experience is unsettling, almost impossible to explain — as if the canvas itself contains hidden sound.

For the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, this sensation was real. Kandinsky experienced chromesthesia, a rare form of synesthesia in which sound and color merge together in the brain. He claimed that colors carried musical tones and that paintings could function like symphonies. His monumental Composition VII was not merely an image, but an orchestration of emotion, rhythm, and vibration translated into paint.

Kandinsky was not alone in searching for invisible harmonies. Hilma af Klint painted spirals and symbols inspired by spiritual visions. František Kupka transformed motion and vibration into rotating circles of color. Paul Gauguin pursued emotional resonance through luminous tropical palettes, while Stuart Davis infused jazz rhythms into bold American abstraction.

Composers experienced similar crossings of the senses. Olivier Messiaen described chords as bursts of color. Alexander Scriabin designed performances that combined music with projected light, believing sound and color belonged together. Even Richard Wagner wrote of musical tones as possessing emotional “color,” as though music itself painted the imagination.

Science can partially explain these experiences. Neurologists believe chromesthesia may result from unusual cross-connections between regions of the brain responsible for sound and sight. Yet the deeper mystery remains unresolved: why do people without synesthesia still feel music inside a painting or sense color inside a chord?

Perhaps the answer lies in art itself. The greatest abstract works seem to bypass ordinary language and speak directly to perception. They remind us that the senses are less separate than we imagine — that rhythm can be seen, color can be felt, and silence can sometimes sound like music.

Maybe Kandinsky was right all along: paintings do not merely hang on walls. Under the right gaze, they begin to sing.