Read Ebook: Collecting Old Glass English and Irish by Yoxall J H James Henry Sir

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 357 lines and 22835 words, and 8 pages

INDEX 107

The glassware made in England and Ireland during the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth century was the best of the kind ever made. In quality, tint, feel, and ring the plain blown glass was a beautiful product, and when it was cut or engraved the decoration was done by fine craftsmen and often with excellent taste. Old glass has its own peculiar charm; the dark beauty of the crystal metal, the variety of form, the bell-like ring when flipped, the satiny feeling of the surface, the sparkle of the cut facets, and the combination of gracefulness and usefulness attract a collector: in cabinets it shines, gleams, glows, and sparkles in a reticent, well-bred way.

Then there is attraction in the historical and social traditions which have gathered around the ware; romance lingers on in the Jacobite glasses, the Williamite glasses, the Georgian glasses, the rummers and groggers engraved and drunk from to celebrate the victories of Nelson or famous elections; and humour resides in many of the relics of the punch-bowl and six-bottle days. To honour particular occasions one's fine old glasses may come out of the cabinet and be used at table again; I know a collector of "captain glasses" who brings them out for champagne. For decoration or in use old glass has a refined, artistic, aristocratic air.

NEITHER TOO RARE NOR TOO PLENTIFUL

The sound of the past seems to throb in the ring of this frail and dainty ware; at your touch the cry of the bygone seems heard again. Because of fragility, enough of eighteenth-century glass has not lasted on to make it common, and yet so much of it is still extant that a collector's hunt for it is by no means a hopeless quest. It may still be acquired at reasonable prices from dealers in antiques, and a hunter for it in odd corners, who buys in shillings, not in pounds, may reasonably hope to pick up many fine specimens for next to nothing even yet. Four years ago I bought a fine drawn cordial glass for 2d. Within the past three years I have myself bought a perfect captain glass for 3s. 6d.; within the last year I have bought six punch-lifters for 17s. 6d. in all, uncommon as these bibulous old siphons are. A large Bristol coloured-glass paper-weight may cost you ?3 in a dealer's shop, because three years ago they began to be a "rage," but within the past two years I have bought a Bristol glass article, equally beautiful in colour and glass-flowers, and much rarer, for 2s. Footless coaching glasses and thistle-shaped fuddling glasses are seldom seen, even on a dealer's shelves, but I have found one of each, in odd corners, for 6d.

THE TIME TO COLLECT IS NOW

Now, if ever, is the time to collect old glass rather cheaply, for already the prices of it are mounting in a remarkable way. Thirty years ago old wine glasses engraved with roses, rosebuds, and butterflies--rose glasses, as they are called--could be bought for half-a-crown apiece or less--dozens of them; this price has multiplied nearly twentyfold. Waterford cut-glass grows more and more dear to buy, from dealers who know it when they possess it--they will soon be selling it as if it were antique silver, at so much per ounce--but only last year I bought in a provincial town a captain glass of this ware for 15s., though ?8 was the price asked for one just like it in the West End. Now, if ever, is the time for a beginner to take up this line of collecting; old English and Irish glass will never again be so easy to find at reasonable prices as it is now.

SUCH CONNOISSEURSHIP NOT DIFFICULT

Collecting is a form of education, but it is not difficult to become a knowledgeable collector of old glass. Counterfeits are sent out by the thousand, forgeries lie in wait, totally new glassware, imitative of the old, is on sale in hundreds of curio dealers' shops, some of them otherwise honest and respectable; but only ignorance or carelessness need be taken in. A little study, a little observation, a little care, and the beginner will soon be able to avoid mistakes. Connoisseurship in old glass is less difficult than it is in old china, for example; porcelain or earthenware collecting is more various, more detailed, has reference to longer periods of manufacture, and involves much more specific knowledge than glass-collecting does. Yet I have known two or three collectors of porcelain who declined to begin collecting old glass because, they said, they would "never dare"--as if an almost miraculous skill were needed to become a connoisseur in old glass! In point of fact, this is the easiest hobby to study and know; glass-collecting requires an eye for the different shades and tints of the metal, a finger-tip for the feel of it, an ear for the ring of it, and not much money as yet, and practically that is all. There are no trade-marks to puzzle or deceive you; there is no such distinction, difficult to understand and master, as between "soft" china and "hard." At present old glass is easy to know, and not difficult to find.

ADVANTAGES ASSOCIATED WITH GLASS

The collecting of old glass is not yet systematized; there are no dealers' catalogues of it or prices current. For the next few years this advantage will continue in connexion with old glass. Every dealer knows the high price which square-marked Worcester china can command; every second-hand bookseller knows the price current of first editions, or copies of rare books; but such is not the case with old glass as yet. Systematization has hardly begun; there has been little research into the history of makes and the names of makers. Here is another advantage for a collector: he may discover things of that kind at present unknown, and thus attach his name to the history of old glass which will some day be written. A local collector may at no great cost make a donation of his treasures to the local museum. There is no public collection of Newcastle-made glass at Newcastle, for instance, or of Sunderland-made glass at Sunderland, and no local antiquary has studied the history of the fine glass products made on the Tyne and the Wear. Nobody knows which kinds of glass were made at Norwich or Lynn. A history of Stourbridge glass-making and glassware has yet to be written. So that research, that additional delight of collecting, is more open in connexion with glass than with any other well-known "line."

COLLECTABLE GLASS ARTICLES

Much old English and Irish glass was contemporaneously sent to the American market, and the following articles were advertised as on sale at New York in the year 1773: "Very Rich Cut Glass Candlesticks, Cut Glass Sugar Boxes and Cream Potts, Wine, Wine-and-Water Glasses, and Beer Glasses, with Cut Shanks, Jelly and Syllabub Glasses, Glass Salvers, also Cyder Glasses, Orange and Top Glasses, Glass Cans, Glass Cream Buckets and Crewets, Royal Arch Mason Glasses, Globe and Barrel Lamps, etc." The "etc." would be capacious; it would include most of the articles mentioned in the paragraph just preceding this, and such things as crystal globes to be filled with water through which a candle might throw and condense its rays, for sewing or lace-making purposes, at night.

A collector ignores window-glass, unless he can come upon stained glass, purchasing, for ?5 perhaps, a leaded square or oval of sixteenth-century Swiss or German painted glass, to hang in one of his windows. A collector ignores plate-glass, except in the form of mirrors, perhaps. A collector ignores carboys, and also ordinary bottles, but he acquires when he can one of the thick, stumpy, almost black glass bottles in which Georgian people bottled their own claret or port, imported in the cask. It adds interest to an antique bookcase, corner cupboard, or cabinet if the panes, or some of them, show the slight curvature characteristic before perfectly flat sheet-glass could be cast; and there are some old panes in which the oxides have turned to a violet colour--a silversmith's shop nearly opposite the top end of the Haymarket still displays some--which are of interest to-day. There used to be glass objects which, I suppose, we shall never come upon now: the "mortar" or nightlight-glass, of the kind which stood beside the last sleep of Charles I, and the "singing-glasses" which Pepys heard in 1668, when he "had one or two singing-glasses made, which make an echo to the voice, the first I ever saw; but so thin, that the very breath broke one or two of them." These, and many other beautiful pieces of old glass, are for ever gone out of reach.

But the hunter may come upon pieces which came into existence before Queen Anne died: Jacobean glass, of the reign of Charles II at latest, is occasionally found. For a guinea I obtained a fine sacramental vessel in purfled and wreathed glass bearing the symbol of the Trinity ; for 5s. a pistol-shaped scent bottle; and for 12s. 6d. a hand lamp, all three of Jacobean date.

THE HUNT FOR IT

In fact, the limits in glass-collecting are not yet fixable; you never know what quaint or rare thing you may not come upon in old glass. Other lines of collecting are already systematized, and part of the systematization is a limiting of what you may expect to find and a raising of what you may have to pay. With glass there are no such boundaries, at present; anything out of the ordinary in shape, purpose, or date, may be acquired, and should be--the uncommon pieces are the best--though often because a piece is quite unusual, it will be offered you at a very low price. The smaller dealers know that from half a guinea to a couple of guineas is what they may charge for an old wine glass, according to the knobs or the spiral in its stem, but they do not know any fixed price for less common specimens, and they will sell at a hundred per cent. profit on the very small charges they themselves have paid.

Armed with knowledge of the general tests which I give in the next chapter, a collector may enter a dealer's shop near Bond Street or a marine stores in the Old Kent Road, a broker's at Hackney or a cabinet-maker's warehouse in a country town, a second-hand furniture shop at Hammersmith or the Caledonian market on a Friday; he may look into a butler's pantry, peer into a cupboard in a kitchen corner, search amidst the dust of a lumber-room, or reach to the deep interior of a farmhouse dresser or sideboard; and almost always he will come upon a collectable bit of old glass. He may hope to come upon an old crystal gazing-ball, used by fashionable fortune-tellers a century ago; or even one of the old glass eggs which eighteenth-century ladies held in their hands to keep their palms cool for a lover's kiss.

THE COLLECTOR'S RANGE

Setting forth to collect old glassware, therefore, what general guides may the beginner use, and what reliable tests can he apply?

These seven suffice to equip the beginner. But as he collects and gains experience, many details and developments of them will come to his knowledge, which I shall refer to in their place.

It should be remembered that there are no maker's marks to go by in glass, as there are in porcelain, earthenware, Sheffield plate, or pewter; and no signatures, as there are in paintings, drawings, and etchings.

The glass collector exercises his sight and applies the test; it enables him to detect a counterfeit, though in shape and general appearance it imitates the genuine antique; it is too whitely crystal, too tintless to be old. Curio-shop windows at Brighton, for instance, are full of frauds in glass, chiefly cut-glass, or glass moulded to resemble cut-glass; but the chalky-white tint betrays and condemns them, and the instructed collector will not be taken in. Also he will recognize genuine Waterford glass by its own tinge of colour, and genuine Cork glass in a similar way; he will see that old Dutch-made glass, when thick, has a smeary, milk-and-watery tint, and when thin has a flashy, meretricious absence of deep tinting: he will learn that old Stourbridge glass was whiter than antique Bristol or Newcastle glass, and sometimes was milky-white; in course of time and practice he will come to be able to "date" and "place" a piece of old glass at sight, as well as instantly to reject a fraud.

So that now, with both tint and sound to guide us, we need not be taken in by modern copies or old Dutch glass.

In his privately circulated book on "English Baluster Stemmed Glasses of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" Mr. Francis Buckley aptly says that "English-made glasses of the first period were all light in weight and cloudy in appearance. Some time between the Restoration and the end of the seventeenth century, but when precisely it is difficult to say, the English glass-makers began to try experiments with a view to removing from their glasses this dull and cloudy appearance. Their object was to produce a substance like crystal; and this object they eventually achieved by introducing into their metal a large quantity of lead." This gave the characteristic weight.

Many fantastic pieces of old glass were made as curiosities or ornaments, but most old glass was made for use. Glass is easily scratched; as the wine glasses and decanters were set down upon the hard, polished mahogany of dinner-tables, after the cloth was drawn, and were moved, the feet of the wine glasses and the bases of the decanters become scratched thereby. Lustre-ornaments, glass candlesticks, or glass vases which stood upon marble or hard wood mantelpieces, being moved when maidservants were dusting, became scratched at the base. The collector will therefore carefully examine those parts of a piece of glass which, if it is old, may be expected to show the signs of use and wear caused by contact and movement upon hard surfaces; it is well to do this by the aid of a pocket-lens--which ought to be a glass collector's constant companion.

Yet it is not wise to condemn and refuse as a fraud a piece of glass which shows the other four or five general evidences of genuineness simply because only slight scratching is evident; for the glass may have been standing in a cupboard unused for many years, its nose put out of joint by some change of fashion in table-ware soon after it had been bought, and have passed into a collector's cabinet before coming into your hands for examination. Nor is it safe to suppose that the more the scratches the older the piece; it may have had more than the common amount of usage. If the glass has a "folded foot" or a "ring-base" to stand on, the scratches will be at the very edge of the foot, or on the ring, just where it touched the table or mantelpiece, and there only.

I mention this last because it does not apply to all old glass; it does not apply to glass that was cast or moulded, but it applies to all old blown glass, and is a very important test and guide indeed.

In the oldest glass the pontil-hole is flaked with something which rather resembles mica. In the oldest wine glasses the pontil-lump stands out knobbily. In every case there are signs of the local fracture. As a rule, the older the glass the bigger and rougher the pontil-mark.

The sensible, practical adaptation to purpose and the workmanlike make of English and Irish old glass afford another test; compared with our native product, French glass of the same period seems meagre, and Dutch flimsy or clumsy; Italian is fantastic and tawdry. The French and the Italian ware was often gilded, the Dutch painted: these are features seldom seen on English and Irish glass. In place of gilding or other added external decoration the island ware presented a substance neither too thin nor too thick, bowls perfectly rounded, stems strong and stout but not bulky, too tall, or too short; feet that hold on to the table well, and are not warped and uneven. In the freak and toy pieces, too, the excellence of the workmanship is obvious.

The blow-pipe is not so old an implement as the potter's wheel, but it seems to have been used 5000 years ago, in Egypt. Pliny first gave the fanciful account of Phoenician mariners accidentally fusing carbonate of soda with sea-sand; Dr. Johnson commented on that as follows: "Who, when he saw the first sand or ashes by a casual intenseness of heat melted into a metallic form, rugged with excrescences, and clouded with impurities, would have imagined that in this shapeless lump lay concealed so many conveniences of life as would in time constitute a great part of the happiness of the world? Yet by some such fortuitous liquefaction was mankind taught to procure a body at once in a high degree solid and transparent; which might admit the light of the sun and exclude the violence of the wind; which might extend the view of the philosopher to new ranges of existence, supply the decays of nature, and succour old age with subsidiary sight."

Drinking glasses are the most favoured aim of collectors and at present are the old glass objects most frequently offered, but as glass-collecting becomes more popular other glass objects are brought out of cupboards and places where they have been lying neglected; and my counsel is that a collector should acquire any piece of old blown-glass ware which he can.

THE ORIGIN OF CUT-GLASS

English-and Irish-made glass, being heavier and better quality than any other, lent itself to cutting especially well; but probably the chief cause of the development of cut-glass here was the excise duty, which was levied on the plain manufactured article, so to speak--the glassware as the blower or moulder turned it out. The excise on that having been paid, all additional value given to the ware afterwards was non-taxable; therefore cutting came into vogue, and the glass cut in these islands became the best in the world. Of all cut-glass "Waterford" was the most beautiful; its specific gravity was the greatest, and deep cutting could take place without the ware being clumsily heavy to begin with.

THE "WATERFORD" STYLE OF CUTTING

Cork, Dublin, and Belfast cut-glass resembles Waterford cut-glass in everything but tint and weight, and perhaps it was the Celtic strain in the Irish glass-cutters' blood which gave a more than English freedom and fantasy to their art. At any rate, the style of their cutting may be described as "curved" and "arabesque"; it was also shallow, generally; flowing lines and slight hollows, flattish rounded curves, and interlacings are evident; stems and candlesticks are "whittled" rather than cut deeply; rims are often surrounded by little semicircles, the edge of each semicircle being cut into angles with sharp points; sometimes these resemble half-open fans. The less the amount of cut ornament, the earlier the piece, as a rule. There is English style diamond-shaped cutting in Irish glass, and some "hob-nail" cutting--shaped flat ends standing out as hob-nails do from boot soles: there is some "strawberry" cutting; but as a rule, a fluent, curving, arabesquing style of cutting, with parallel horizontal lines, hollow prisms, upright fluting, and parallel vertical lines in panels, the latter sometimes resembling basket-plaiting, characterize Waterford cut-glass.

THE "STOURBRIDGE" CUTTING

The Stourbridge glass-cutters, on the other hand, rather over-did and abused the deep, regular, machine-like repetition of the "diamond" and the "hob-nail" and the "pomegranate." Sometimes, however, the cutting was flat and flowing, and a festoon-like, hung-tapestry-like form may be seen.

THE "BRISTOL" CUTTING

Bristol glass-cutters went in for depth, but also for fantasy: a leaflike arrangement may be seen: the flowing lines in "Bristol" cutting are not so fine and curved as they are in Waterford glass.

"NEWCASTLE" CUTTING

Perhaps the "thistle" glasses, so popular in Scotland, were made and cut at Newcastle, the nearest glass-making centre: but "thistle cutting" does not mean cut like a thistle; it means minute diamond-shape cuts upon a vessel conventionally resembling a thistle-head in shape.

THE STAR AT THE BASE

MOULDED GLASS

Cutting could be done, and was done, either upon glassware originally blown, or upon glass originally moulded--that is, cast in a mould. Sometimes the stem or shank and foot were left untouched while the upper part of the vessel was cut. Moulded glass uncut shows no acuteness of edge nor sharpness in the depressions. Modern moulded glass is often very elaborate, however, and the beginner may readily be deceived.

ENGRAVED GLASS

Some part of the engraving on some glasses was really cutting: in roses which form part of the decoration of finely engraved glasses, the finger feels plane after plane of depression, where the engraver deeply cut away the metal to imitate the petals of the rose. When the engraving goes as deep as this, or deeper than usual, the effect is to give a dust colour to the engraved work, which helps one to be sure that the object before one is not an old plain glass recently "engraved up" with a Jacobite or other design to make it sell for more money.

The polishing-wheel was also used to remove the pontil-mark from the feet of wine and other glasses.

At Bristol, Nailsea, Wrockwardine, and perhaps at Norwich, glassware of various colours was made. There are collectors who care for nothing else but coloured glass; there are collectors who only care for coloured glass paper-weights; there are collectors who will not buy coloured glass at all.

"BRISTOL"

Less rare, but rare, are the wine glasses with red and white or blue and white spirals in the stems which were made at Bristol; if the white is not cotton-white but greyish, however, such a glass is probably old Dutch.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet