: Old Glass and How to Collect it by Lewis J Sydney - Glassware Collectors and collecting; Glassware Great Britain; Glassware Prices

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CATALOGUE OF PRICES OF PRINCIPAL PIECES OF GLASS 191

INTRODUCTORY

The origin of glass is lost in antiquity. Pliny, indeed, ascribes its discovery to certain Phoenician mariners who, being shipwrecked upon a sandy shore, used a block of the natron which formed their cargo to support a pot which they were putting over an improvised fire. The heat fused the sand with the natron, and lo! the glass was discovered in the ashes.

Since, however, Pliny's authority was Rumour, and since, also, such a phenomenon is a physical impossibility--for no bonfire could produce a temperature at which sand would fuse--it is possible that Rumour in Pliny's day had a no greater reputation for reliability than in the twentieth century. But the story, if not true, is at least well invented and serves to show at how early an age in the world's history glass was known.

At a later date glass was extensively made in Alexandria, the sand in the vicinity being of exceptional purity and so, suitable for its manufacture. The city speedily became celebrated for the beauty of its output, and articles of Alexandrian glass were largely exported to Greece and to Rome, where also, in the space of a few years, glass-houses were established; and to Constantinople, which was, in time, to become famous for the manufacture of coloured glass and of the Mosaics so dear to the Oriental taste.

The Greeks do not appear to have developed the art of glass-making at a very early age, but specimens of glass have been found in Grecian tombs, and, in the Golden Age of Ancient Greece, when art and literature reached their zenith under Pericles, glass was certainly employed for purposes of architectural decoration.

In Rome, however, the art of glass manufacture found a congenial home and was developed to a high pitch of excellence. So widespread was its use that it is a truism to say that in Rome of two thousand years ago glass was employed for a greater number of purposes--domestic, architectural, and ornamental--than it is to-day, even though the glazing of windows was in its infancy and the use of the material for optical purposes was scarcely known. In effect, coloured and ornamental glass held much the same place in the Roman household that china and earthenware do among us to-day. Glass was used for pavements and for the external covering of walls. The Roman glass-workers were particularly happy in their combination of colours, both by fusing together threads of various colours, or by fusing masses, so as to imitate onyx, porphyry, serpentine, and other ornamental stones.

The most interesting of all was the famous cameo glass. A bubble of opaque white glass was blown, and this was coated with blue and a further layer of opaque white superimposed. The outer coat of blue was removed from the portion which was to display the design, leaving the white to be carved into whatever figures the artist's fancy dictated. The finest example extant of this kind of ware is the famous Portland vase in the British Museum.

Meanwhile, other European nations had taken their cue from Venice, and glass-houses sprang up in various parts of the Continent, particularly in France and in Bohemia; the latter, indeed, speedily became the great rival of Venice.

In England, as we shall see, glass was made during the Roman occupation. Under the Saxons, glass-workers were imported from the Continent, but to judge from the number and variety of the specimens found in Anglo-Saxon tombs, it is probable that it was also manufactured to an equal extent at home. During the Middle Ages the art appears to have fallen into abeyance, save in a few isolated instances to be noted later, but in the sixteenth century the custom of using glass vessels was introduced from France and the Low Countries, most of the pieces being imported from Venice. To prevent the money thus expended from leaving the country, efforts were made about the middle of the century to establish the art by the aid of workmen from Murano, and the history of glass manufactured in England may be said to have fairly begun. It was undoubtedly stimulated by the religious persecutions on the Continent, particularly the Spanish Terror in the Netherlands, for the Low Countries were seriously endeavouring to rival Murano in the art, and the craftsmen who fled for refuge to England undoubtedly did much to develop their trade in the country of their adoption, as did the Huguenot refugees at a later period.

In the seventeenth century the whole process was revolutionised by the introduction of a large proportion of oxide of lead, making what is technically known as "flint" glass--a glass much more brilliant than any other, a quality due partly to its transparency and partly to its increased refractive power, which renders it specially fitted for "cutting"--a process which enhances its beauty by increasing the number of ways in which the light rays falling on the glass are dispersed. The discovery has given English glass a well-deserved pre-eminence for beauty of metal--a pre-eminence which the glass-cutters of the eighteenth century admirably sustained by the excellence of their work.

Although it is no part of the purpose of this book to deal in detail with the technical side of the manufacture of glass, yet some few words as to the nature of the material with which we are dealing are not only desirable but essential to the proper understanding of its various qualities and kinds and the different stages of its manufacture.

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