Part 1

THE COLLECTORS’ POCKET SERIES EDITED BY SIR JAMES YOXALL, M.P.

COLLECTING OLD GLASS

THE COLLECTORS’ POCKET SERIES EDITED BY SIR JAMES YOXALL, M.P.

Each Volume Illustrated. Price 3s 6d net

COLLECTING OLD GLASS By J. H. Yoxall

COLLECTING OLD MINIATURES By J. H. Yoxall

COLLECTING OLD LUSTRE WARE By W. Bosanko

COLLECTING OLD PEWTER By H. J. L. J. Massé

COLLECTING OLD PRINTS By E. Gray

COLLECTING OLD WATER-COLOURS By R. W. Howes

(Other Volumes in Preparation)

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, LTD

COLLECTING OLD GLASS ENGLISH AND IRISH

BY J. H. YOXALL Author of “The Wander Years” “The A B C about Collecting” “More about Collecting”

_The glass of fashion and the mould of form_: Hamlet, iii. 1

LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN, LTD

_First published January 1916_ _New Impression March 1925_

_Printed in Great Britain_

PREFACE

I hope the reader may find that this book, though smaller than others on the same subject, is more helpful and even more comprehensive than they are; that it deals with the glass articles which they mention and with others which they omit; that it simplifies and classifies the study and practice of glass-collecting more than has been done in print heretofore; and that it can do these things because it is written out of personal knowledge, gained from much experience, and not from hearsay or from other books.

Diffuseness has been avoided, but this, I hope, has enabled me to make the book the more lucid, as well as the more succinct. At any rate, it affords hints, general rules, and warnings more numerous and more practical than any published until now; I have also tried to give to it a quality which reviewers have found present in my other books on Collecting--that is, a simplicity and clearness of explanation, done at the most difficult and necessary points, and in an interesting way. Moreover, this book has had the great advantage of revision (before printing) by Mr. G. F. Collins, of 53 the Lanes, Brighton, a pupil of Mr. Hartshorne’s, and well known to all principal collectors of old glass. Most of the illustrations represent typical pieces in my own collection, but for some of the finest I have to thank the kindness of Mrs. Devitt, of Herontye, East Grinstead, a collector indeed. The illustrations do not represent relative sizes to the same scale.

J. H. YOXALL

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. OLD ENGLISH GLASSWARE 1

II. SEVEN GENERAL GUIDES AND TESTS 14

III. BLOWN WARE 26

IV. CUT, MOULDED, AND ENGRAVED WARE 29

V. OLD COLOURED GLASS 35

VI. OLD DRINKING GLASSES 40

VII. THE VARIOUS TYPES OF STEM 46

VIII. THE VARIOUS SHAPES OF BOWL 56

IX. OTHER STEMMED DRINKING GLASSES 60

X. JACOBITE, WILLIAMITE, AND HANOVERIAN GLASSES 66

XI. TUMBLERS, TANKARDS, “JOEYS,” AND “BOOT” GLASSES 73

XII. BOTTLES, DECANTERS, AND JUGS 76

XIII. BOWLS, LIFTERS, SUGAR-CRUSHERS, SPOONS, ETC. 79

XIV. CANDLESTICKS, LUSTRES, AND LAMPS 81

XV. COMPORTS, SWEETMEAT, JELLY AND CUSTARD GLASSES 84

XVI. SALT CELLARS, PEPPER BOXES, SUGAR BASINS, ETC. 88

XVII. MIRRORS, GLASS PICTURES, GLASS KNOBS 90

XVIII. OLD PASTE, GLASS BEADS, AND TAWS 92

XIX. GENERAL HINTS AND WARNINGS 95

INDEX 107

I. OLD ENGLISH GLASSWARE

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.

I propose in this book to _give general hints, “tips,” and instructions applicable to every variety of old glass; to explain the seven principal tests of genuine age and antique make; to prepare the beginner to go out collecting glass with the infallible rules and principles for it fixed in his mind_. Equipped with these, anyone may examine, test, and if satisfactory buy any vessel of glass which he or she may find in any odd corner. I am not writing the book for the rich, but for people with more taste and cultivation than money, and though I deprecate “collecting” for the sake of selling again at a profit, I may well point out that old English and Irish glass, bought cheaply now, may become an investment _de père de famille_; the collector may have the joy of finding it, the continual pleasure of owning it, and yet know that it will turn out to be “good business” for his heirs, when the sale comes, at the end.

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

The number and diversity of old glass articles may be indicated by the following incomplete list: wine glasses, beer glasses, cider glasses, rummers, cordial glasses, liqueur glasses, tumblers, firing glasses, coaching glasses, fuddling glasses, beakers, mugs, tankards, champagne glasses, grog glasses, Masonic glasses, goblets, Joey glasses, “boot” glasses, “yards of ale,” toy glasses; flasks, decanters, trays and waiters; punch or salad bowls, trifle bowls; wine bottles, spirit bottles; jugs, punch-lifters, decanter stands; jelly glasses, custard glasses, flip glasses, syllabub glasses; fruit baskets, centre-pieces, sweetmeat glasses, captain glasses, comports or sweetmeat glass stands, epergnes, tazzas; salt cellars, sugar castors, pepper boxes; caddy sugar bowls; lamps, lanterns, chandeliers, candlesticks, nightlight glasses, taper holders; finger bowls, wine coolers; oil bottles, vinegar bottles, mustard bottles; jars, pickle jars; tea trays, preserve pots; vases, covered vases; rolling-pins, knife rests, knife and fork handles, spoons, sugar crushers; butter pots, celery glasses; weather glasses, chemical glasses, eye baths, witch-balls, porringers, posset vessels, holy-water vessels; door-stops, paper-weights; mirrors, knobs, glass pictures, bellows-shaped flasks, lustres, paste jewels, beads, taws, toy birds, animals, tobacco pipes, bellows on stands, walking-sticks, rapiers, and other elaborate baubles and oddities made for ornament or as _tours de force_. There seems to have been a Glass-makers’ Festival held at Newcastle some hundred years ago, and it was for exhibition then that most of the freak glass toys and ornaments were made.

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 (see next page); 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

The beginner should recognize from the first that the range of the collector of old glass is not yet defined; that the practical hints and rules given in this book may be applied to _any_ piece of glass, and should be, no matter how unusual its form or inexplicable now its use in its time. During the next few years things which now seem oddities, because they are so unusual, may become particularly sought after, and valued because they are rare. I therefore advise the beginner to be a general and diffusing collector, leaving no genuine old piece unsnapped-up which comes within his reach and means. At present cut Waterford glass and spiral-stemmed blown wine glasses are the things most sought after by glass collectors, but they may not be so a few years hence. I do not mean that they will ever drop in selling value now, but I anticipate that the selling value of other glass articles, rather neglected now, may appreciate; that is why I recommend the practice of general and diffusive collecting and a wide range. But if a collector prefers to specialize, he may set out to collect wine glasses only, or inscribed glasses only, or what-not in that way; he may go in for cut-glass only, or blown glass only, or coloured glass only, or toys and eccentricities only; he may choose geographically, collecting Irish glass only, or English glass only, or Bristol glass only, and so forth. In any case his range will be limited by certain dates; he will very seldom come upon a piece so old as the reign of Charles II, and he will not care to collect glassware made so late as the year in which Victoria came to the throne. With Venice-made glass this book has nothing to do. Much old Dutch-made glass exists in England, but the student of this book will be enabled to detect it, and not unintentionally to acquire it believing it to be English made. Bohemian-made glass, cut and coloured, is seldom taken up by collectors here. The range in these islands is for English and Irish glass, for it is the ware most readily collectable, most likely to increase in value, and to be most readily sold when a collection comes to be dispersed; I mention this latter consideration because any collector not wealthy must, in justice to his heirs and dependents, in this matter “look to the end.”

II. SEVEN GENERAL GUIDES AND TESTS

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

There are seven: (1) the _tint_ of the glass; (2) the _sound_ of the glass; (3) the _quality_ of the glass metal (or material); (4) the _weight_; (5) the _signs of use and wear_; (6) the _pontil-mark_; and (7) the _workmanship_.

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.

1. THE TINTS OF OLD GLASS

Old glass is _darkly_ brilliant. It is not _whitely_ crystal as modern glass is; the eye can only see what it looks for, ever, and to uninstructed eyes all glass is merely glass-colour, but the experienced collector sees that there are many different tints and tinges in the crystal of glass. These tints and tinges are the chief guide, test, and principle by which one judges whether a piece of glass is one of the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, or seventeenth century, as the case may be.

To judge the tint, place the piece of glass upon a white tablecloth, near to a tumbler or decanter known to be modern because of recent purchase from an ordinary vendor of household glass. The eye, looking for it, will then notice in the two pieces of glass a striking difference of tint, if one of them is old, that is; the old piece is not only darker than the white of the tablecloth, but darker than the piece of modern glass. And _the darker (or sootier) its tint the older the glass_, as a rule. Tint or tinge is a constant feature in old glass, and an obvious feature directly the eye knows what to look for. Varieties of dark tint may be detected, and by these varieties the bit of glass may be dated, its period determined, and its age assigned.

If you place near each other, upon a white damask cloth, a glass of Charles II date, a William and Mary glass, a George III glass, and a Victorian glass, you will notice a darkening and then a whitening in tint (though not a brightening) as your eye travels from the oldest glass to the most modern. By “tint” or “tinge” I do not mean “colour,” in the sense of red or green or blue; I will deal with coloured glass later on. By “tint” or “tinge” I mean the shade of leaden, darkish hue in the metal from which the glass article was blown or moulded. This tint or tinge was inherent in the molten glass, before shaping and cooling began. The metal or raw material was mixed according to recipe--each glassworks had its own recipe--and one of the materials was lead. The older the Georgian glass, the more impure the metal--that is, the fuller of lead oxides--and therefore the darker; what are called improvements in glass-mixing have gradually eliminated the oxides, and therefore the leaden tint or tinge also; it is astonishing how many different shades and tinges of darkness (in that sense) a cabinet of old glass can show. In a few glasses the bowl is pale sapphire or aquamarine colour, the stem being the tint of plain glass.