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Read Ebook: Collecting Old Glass English and Irish by Yoxall J H James Henry Sir
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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.
Fine tableware of transparent blue, blue-green, red, and purple was made at Bristol; the blue is a peculiar, unique blue, imitated but never well reproduced; where the glass is thick, it, held to the light, shows a Royal purple, and where thin it is almost a sea-blue. Egg-cups of this ware are handsome. Bristol red glass is of a ruby hue, with not so much vermilion in it as in Bohemian glass: there is also "cherry-red" glass. Bristol blue and red glass was sometimes touched with gilt, in lettering and lines; this did not wear well except when embossed.
Bristol produced the finest glass paper-weights--of a size and shape to fill the palm of one's hand if only the wrist and finger-tips are touching the paper--and at the base of these you see flowers of coloured glass, bright and various in hue, and rendered with wonderful skill; of the same kind of mosaic or tessellated glass is a small pepper pot in my possession, a very rare example. Other Bristol paper-weights, larger, and door-stops, still larger and heavier, were tall ovals, two or three or four times the size of a goose's egg and rather resembling one in shape; the colour is a verdant or a sage green, and the inner decoration is flower-petals and leaves, pearled over as if by dew, and blown with extraordinary skill.
Collectors should beware of forgeries of parti-coloured paper-weights. They may be known by the coarseness of the flowers inside the glass, the lack of fine workmanship, and the tawdriness of the colours.
"BRISTOL" AND "NAILSEA"
Nailsea is a small place near Bristol, and nobody can now be sure from which of the two came any particular bauble--coloured glass-flask, pestle, bell, witch-ball, tobacco pipe, trumpet, jug, rolling-pin, bellows-shaped article, walking-stick or rapier, or the long glass cylinders containing coloured glass counters for games. But it is thought that the Bristol wares of this kind were brighter in colour than the Nailsea product, which, because less skilful and daring, perhaps, was cooler in tint, less striking in mixture of colours, and therefore more refined. Probably Bristol produced the glass which is ornamented by alternate broad stripes of red and opal-white. Perhaps Nailsea was responsible for glass of a "greenery-yallery" hue containing whitish spots or splashes: there are many forgeries of jugs and rolling-pins, in this style, about.
"WROCKWARDINE"
"SUNDERLAND"
The Sunderland glassworks are supposed to have made rolling-pins, and almost certainly produced the curious polygonal salt cellars , that reflect colour and gilding or coloured heads of men or women, from their bases, talc keeping the ornament there in place.
MISCELLANEA
Witch-balls seem to have been made at Bristol, for I own one of the Bristol red and opal-white; at Nailsea ; and at Wrockwardine . These balls, it is said, were hung at each door and window, "to keep the witches out" .
GREEN, PURPLE, AND YELLOW WINE GLASSES
Fine wine glasses, for hock or other white wines, were made in olive-green, grass-green, purple, and orange; these are collected by some people for use at table, by some for the collector's cabinet. The older ones show the characteristics of dimensions and shape which will be described later in this book.
These are the favourite quarry of the hunter for old glass. I prefer the more uncommon and out-of-the-way pieces myself, but the old wine glasses, goblets, cordial glasses, rummers, ale glasses, cider glasses, and so forth are so interesting, often so beautiful, and sometimes so quaint, that I do not wonder at the eager collecting of them.
THE LUMPY STEM
In days when men did not rise from the dinner-table quite so easily as they fell under it, the stem of a drinking glass must be thick, lest it snap in the convulsive hand, and was more safely held when it was also lumpy or bulbous--"knopped" and "baluster"-like are other terms for it: the fingers clung to the knobs.
THE STOUT STEM
THE EXTENSIVE FOOT
Similarly, old drinking glasses were always made with very broad "feet" or bases; usually the foot had a larger circumference than the bowl. A semi-drunken hand, setting the vessel down on the table, might leave it rocking for two or three seconds, but the foot was so broad that it could hardly rock over.
THE RAISED FOOT
Because of the pontil-mark being often a knob, or protuberance, the foot of the glass must not wholly rest upon the table, but touch it near the circumference of the foot only, lest the knob at the end of the stem should prevent the glass standing level, or should scratch the mahogany.
THE DOMED FOOT
Some of the oldest glasses, in which the pontil-mark is quite a large protuberance, stand upon feet which, flat upon the table at and near the edge, rise domelike in the centre. These dome feet are seldom symmetrical; made by hand, the flat part is usually wider on one side of the dome than on the other.
THE HIGH INSTEP FOOT
As the pontil-mark became smaller and not so rough, the dome foot gave place to one which is mainly flat at the base but slightly conical, rising like a low round hillock, to join the stem: seen in profile, these somewhat resemble a leg and a foot with a high instep. No seventeenth-or eighteenth-century stemmed drinking glass except a "firing" glass has a foot with an uniformly flat section.
THE HEMMED OR FOLDED FOOT
Many old wine glasses are chipped at the edge of the foot; this was due to carelessness in the scullery sometimes, but often to careless use by convivial guests. Therefore glass-makers learned the advantage of folding the edge of the foot under, like a hem in needlework; a rounded edge, less likely to be chipped, was thus obtained. This "hem" is nearly always irregular, being turned in more at one part of the base than another. As a rule, the presence of a folded foot indicates that the glass was made before 1760.
THE "NORWICH" FOOT
Nobody knows what kind of glasses were made at Norwich or Lynn, but there is a supposition that horizontal lines, in the bowl or in the foot, mean "Norwich-made": the foot is slightly terraced, so to speak.
THE FIRING GLASS FOOT
There is, I believe, in certain Lodges, a semi-ritual practice of hammering on the table with the feet of glasses, rhythmically, after a toast, somewhat in the style of applause called "Kentish fire." This seems never to have been done with wine glasses, but old cordial or spirit glasses exist in considerable numbers which were expressly made for the purpose, and furnished with flat feet an eighth of an inch thick or more, so that they should not crack by concussion; in these old "firing-glasses," too, the foot is bigger in circumference than the bowl.
GENERAL RULES
"THUMB" GLASSES
"Thumb" glasses are those in which the external surface of the bowl is pitted with depressions the size of a finger-end, so that the shaking hand of the bibulous might be the less likely to let the glass drop. They are usually tall of bowl and short of stem, but rather big of foot.
THE SQUARE FOOT
Old glasses with thick square bases appear to belong to the end of the eighteenth century, when the "Empire" style was influencing manufacture: often the base is of inferior workmanship to the bowl.
THE FEET OF TUMBLERS
Even the bases of tumblers were made thick, though they were smaller in circumference than the top of the tumbler.
Wine glasses and other drinking vessels of glass may best be classified according to the shape or decoration of the stem.
The oldest English drinking glasses are those which have lumpy, knobby, bulbous stems, of wavy outlines imitating the stems of Tudor and Stuart silver goblets, and rather resembling the shape of balusters in stair or terrace balustrades, or the uprights in some old gate-leg tables; perhaps among the baluster stems we should class those which rather resemble an inverted obelisk, the broad part just under the bowl and the point within the foot ; this long remained the favourite shape for what are called sweetmeat glasses on stems, and for comports or glass stands for sweetmeat glasses; it gives a kind of shoulder to the stem. Sometimes the lower part of such a stem as this is square in section.
THE COLLAR IN THE BALUSTER STEM
Often the stem does not directly join the bottom of the bowl, but has a "neck," with an outstanding ring of glass or "collar" around the neck; sometimes the collar is double or triple; the neck and collar were often used later, in other than baluster stems. Sometimes the collar is near the foot; sometimes there are two collars. Around some stems a fillet is found; these are very rare.
THE OLDER BALUSTERS
COINS IN THE BALUSTER STEMS
Two things may be looked for inside these stems--coins and "tears." Sometimes one of the swelling-out parts of the baluster stem was large enough to enclose a small silver coin; a coin glass is exceedingly rare and correspondingly valuable, but the date of the coin does not necessarily indicate the date of the glass.
"TEARS" IN THE STEM
"Drawn glasses" were made at twice--the bowl and the stem in one, the foot added later. To understand better this meaning of the word "drawn," imagine a soap-bubble with the extra suds adhering to one part of it, and suppose that the extra suds could be drawn out to make a stem; that was the method used in glass. The plain, round stem resembles a solid cylinder, but it is part of the bowl, in fact it is a continuation of the bowl. The end of the cylinder, around which the foot was welded, made a pontil-lump, and therefore the plain stem glass has either a high instep or a dome foot.
The plain round stems were made stout because of insobriety, though that had begun to lessen when this second type of stem came into vogue. "Tears" are often seen in the plain round stems.
Stems which are ornamented by outside spirals, or series of small ridges and grooves alternating, are usually old Dutch; but some of them are English, though of inferior quality and ring. The quality is so poor and the make so unsatisfactory that probably they were a "cheap and nasty" contemporary imitation and substitute for glasses adorned with the air spiral, the type which succeed the plain round stem. It is hardly likely that the corrugated stem preceded the air-spiral stem; or, if at all, for more than a few years. With these corrugated stems one expects to find, almost without exception, that the bowl of the glass is shaped like an inverted, incurving, waisted bell.
Sometimes the spiral is so very brilliant that it seems as if it were made of quicksilver, and collectors call it "silver spiral" or "brilliant air-twist"; but this is probably an effect of light. In all cases the air spiral is glass colour, the tint of the rest of the glass; red, cotton-white, and blue spirals belong to the type of stem to be mentioned next. Sometimes, it is true, a white thread is seen running down the centre of the stem, within the network of air spirals; but oftener when this central thread occurs, it is "air-colour" itself.
Air-spiral stems are found in cordial and spirit glasses, firing glasses, and goblets with short stems.
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