The Rose Helmut lamp in question isn’t the only Tiffany lamp to grace “Antiques Roadshow.” In 2008 a seller brought in a pair of Tiffany lamps for appraisal. The taller lamp was appraised at $85,000 and the smaller lamp at $45,000. Another odd-looking, turtleback Tiffany lamp from years later reached an appraisal of $30,000 to $40,000. Yet another Tiffany Lamp was appraised at $10,000 to $15,000. Other lamps, however, only look like Tiffany lamps, such as an imitation Tiffany in a 2012 edition of “Antiques Roadshow,” available on PBS. That last lamp was bought for $4,000 and at the time of appraisal would have sold for maybe $300 to $600. Each one of these lamps has its own family history that brought it to the present.
Appraiser Arlie Sulka, however, evaluated the Rose Helmut lamp at higher than any of those above-mentioned lamps. As PBS shows, one of the sisters who sold the lamp says that their mother bought it in the late 1960s after seeing it advertised in some local flyer. The original seller apparently knew it was a Tiffany lamp, and it had already belonged to her grandfather, but she sold it regardless as it didn’t fit in her apartment. The mother of the two sisters on “Antiques Roadshow” kept the lamp in good condition, away from her five “rambunctious” children, and eventually it made its way to television.
