I picked up this Howard Pierce Quail a few months ago at the thrift for a dollar. I’m always thrilled to find Pierce items “out in the wild.” They’re rather hard to come across, even if they’re the smaller unmarked items from a set, because they are rather distinctive in form and glaze. Once you see a few, you probably won’t pass them over.

The most interesting thing about this quail, however, is the backstamp. It is marked in the following way:

You will have to ignore the dark black “2W” that a thrift store worker decided to mark directly on the bottom unprotected part of the clay. I hate it when they do that. But have a look at the incised mark on the base that reads “AB” or something. I know that Howard Pierce items are sometimes marked with different letter / number combinations in order to signify an experimental glaze. But I haven’t really heard of a piece marked in this fashion before. It’s quite strange and looks rather crudely done.

At first, I’d thought perhaps this was a reproduction fake. I’ve seen the work of newer companies that try to emulate the style of Howard Pierce, but they are almost always very noticeably different. This looks like an exact model of his quail - if it is a fake, it is an extremely accurate one, down to the glaze treatment. I’m just not convinced that it could be a fake - since quail are among the more common Pierce items, why wouldn’t a faker copy a more valuable animal? It just doesn’t add up.

In any case, if you’ve ever heard of this type of marking on Pierce items, or you’ve come across Pierce counterfeits, I’d be interested to hear it.