Amateur artists often use other materials when paper or canvas is not available. Antique paintings on shovels, dried fungus, shells, breadboards or artist’s palettes are often found. Collectors like this type of folk art, and it sells for its decorative value more than for the subject matter of the painting. Sometimes the painting is by a well-known artist, and the price reflects this added value.

Recently an oil painting on a clamshell just 7 1/2-inches wide sold at a Maine auction. It pictured a three-masted schooner with billowing sails. The artist is thought to have been Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen, an American who lived from 1850 to 1921. Because of his painting skill and his fame, the shell painting sold for $6,900.

My Chippendale-style pedestal table originally belonged to my grandparents. It might even have been handed down to them. The diameter of the tabletop is 28 inches. A metal plate on the underside of the top reads “The Tobey Furniture Co., Est. 1855 Chicago, New York.” Can you provide history?

The Tobey Furniture Co. was a premier furniture manufacturer and retailer in Chicago for nearly a century, from 1855 to 1954. Its corporate name changed over the years, but it became Tobey Furniture Co. in 1875. Your table was one of the company’s reproduction pieces, and it probably dates from the late 1890s.

My grandmother left me an Art Nouveau-style silver brooch decorated with blue enamel. The back is marked with the intertwined initials “CH.” Can you help me figure out who made it?

The style of your brooch and the initials are clues that point to an English firm called Charles Horner. The company’s history dates back to the mid-1800s, when a West Yorkshire man named Charles Horner (1837-1896) started a thimble-manufacturing business. Charles’ sons, Charles Henry and James, continued the operation after their father’s death. They opened a new factory in Halifax, England, in 1905 and added jewelry and silverware to the company’s product lines. Charles Horner’s output of Art Nouveau enameled silver and gold jewelry was large. Brooches in excellent condition sell for around $500. The Charles Horner company went out of business in 1984.

I have an 8-1/2-inch-tall black metal figure of a waiter carrying a tray. Its style is definitely modern, but the mark on the bottom is “Frankart 1929.” Can you give me any information?

Frankart Inc. operated in New York City during the 1920s and early ’30s. The firm mass-produced artistic Art Deco sculptures that served as lamps, ashtrays and decorative items. Items were made of white cast metal that was spray-painted. Your figure, spray-painted black, was marketed as an ashtray. The metal tray carried by the waiter originally came with a pottery insert that served as the ashtray.

I found an old toy from my childhood (I’m 52) when I cleaned out my parents’ attic. It’s a plastic figure of a person with a large, ball-shaped body and a small, ball-shaped head. The large ball has an indentation on the bottom, so if you push the figure onto its side, it bounces back up. The figure’s painted features include a shock of hair, a tiny mouth, large eyes, a pair of arms and legs, a collar and two shirt buttons. Can you tell me anything about it?

Your toy is called a “roly-poly.” Roly-poly toys have been around for generations. It is likely that your toy was manufactured in the early 1950s by the Irwin Corp. of Fitchburg, Mass. Irwin made celluloid novelty toys beginning about 1922 and switched to plastic during the ’40s. The company made small plastic cars, dollhouse furniture and other toys through the ’50s. Irwin Corp. was sold in 1973.

Tip

Reverse-painted lamps should never be washed. Just dust them.