Topic: Burmese? ewer with enamel and gilt decoration — Id & date please

[krsilber]

Are you sure it's Burmese?  The colors are similar, but there's no shading to it, it looks like plain cased glass to me.  I've heard Fenton had a lot of trouble with their Burmese; maybe this is an alternative.  I imagine the pink rim was added.

I know you hate the UV light thing, but does it all glow?

[Ohio]

To the best of my knowledge (with the possible exception of Fenton) real Burmese is not cased. Regarding Peachblow...if you follow the strict defination of Billings Peachblow Glass reference then the manufacturer had to have marketed the product under the name Peachblow or some derivative of the word "peach" for it to be considered Peachblow...they consider everything else pink cased glass. I'm am simply stating their reference, I am not saying I agree or disagree with their stance. As for the Fenton...just ask the Yahoo Fenton group what the formula, procedure is for Fenton Burmese...they will probably know & Jim Measell might even pop in to tell you. Ken

[redheat4]

Quote from Ruth Hurst Vose " 'Burmese' glass is a single-layered glass shading from opaque greenish-yellow to deep pink at the top. It was developed by the Mt. Washington Glass Company, New Bedford, Mass. Frederick S. Shirley patented his formula for Burmese in 1885 for the firm".

" Frederick Shirley's formula for Burmese glass was patented in England in 1886. Thomas Webb & Sons of Stourbridge, purchased a licence to copy Burmese products".

Rightly or wrongly I have always called your type of glass 'cased Satin' glass and assumed English Victoria.

Ian

[butchiedog]

krsilber,

"I know you hate the UV light thing, but does it all glow?" LOL!

I wouldn't waste the emotion of hate on glassware, I just saw the glowing thing as a novel gimmick when the fad began and like a joke that has been told too many times;   I just find it to be old and stale now.

Anyway, yes;  it does do the glowing thing, it also has the Fenton label, plus a Fenton logo with a 9 for the 1990s pressed into the bottom and it was sold with a hang tag, which said Burmese Glass on it, with some history about Burmese Glass.

My take and my own personal rule of thumb is;  is it's what the maker called it, no matter what the older glass makers did and no matter what the collectable glass book authors, sellers and collectors say.

Of course I don't sell, so my rules are for my own collecting, which I try to improve on whenever I can and I prefer to keep glass making history as separate from glass collecting history as I can, since they are two different things and tend to cause confusion when mixed. --- Mike

[heartofglass]

Not Burmese of any type, this ewer is cased shaded pink glass circa 1880s & far more likely Bohemian than English.
I have a selection of Burmese both Victorian Webb & modern Fenton & all of it is single layer, non-cased & contains uranium. Fenton has made "Burmese" type glass without uranium, they call it Lotus Mist & Blue Burmese.
So I would look to researching Bohemian glass refiners for the decoration on this piece.

[Bernard C]

Chrisine, Mike, Kristi, Ken, Ian, and Marinka — Thank you all for your interesting and informative replies.

Let me first apologise.   It may appear rather strange to you all, but I have never even handled an example of Burmese glass, although I should have taken the opportunity when Arnoldo Toso showed me his small collection of old Webb and Mt. Washington pieces — there was a lot more there to see!   Hence it hadn't occurred to me whether or not Burmese was cased.

My ewer is cased, actually three layers.   The inside layer, taking up about half the thickness of the glass, is an opaque white opal.   Then a layer of clear crystal.   And finally, a thin layer of ruby.   The effect of ruby shading to pink was achieved simply by stretching this outer layer during the blowing process, as with the vase you found, Christine (btw what wonderful dealer spin, saying almost nothing but most impressively), and a pair of large thorn vases, discussed here, and also note my comments there about raw materials representatives spreading knowledge.   The oval cross-section body and round foot were formed in a shape mould, and you can just make out the mould line running up the narrow sides of the jug, showing as a slight bulge on the left of the foot here.

Mike — checking with my UV tester in complete darkness does yield a pale apple green fluorescence.

As for the decoration I had considered whether the applied pieces were possibly coral, before deciding on small pieces of opal glass.   You will understand my surprise when, browsing arount the Internet, I found references to coralene decoration associated with Burmese, discussed briefly here.   The opal pieces on my ewer are not beads, all of the same size, but chips of varying size.

... So I would look to researching Bohemian glass refiners for the decoration on this piece.

Marinka — How?

Bernard C. 

ps Mike, nice to meet a kindred spirit, see here.

[Ohio]

Mike: "My take and my own personal rule of thumb is;  is it's what the maker called it, no matter what the older glass makers did and no matter what the collectable glass book authors, sellers and collectors say"

Yeah buddy....thats exactly the way I feel, especially when it comes to so called "Vaseline" glass. Uranium glass & reactive glass I can understand because at least it references the chemical composition. Ken

[krsilber]

Interesting that there's a layer of crystal (colorless) in there...must give a bit of a sense of depth to it.

Tough one to pinpoint as to origin.  Bohemian makers did a lot of shaded work, trying to mimic Peach Blow and Burmese type glass.  The decoration doesn't look particularly Bohemian to me, though; seems more reminiscent of English work.

"Coralene" - now there's another term I've gotten in a lengthy discussion about, as Ken will attest to.

I can see several problems with using only the terms companies themselves used.  Not everyone knows the terms.  It's inconvenient to write out all the terms that mean basically the same thing (e.g. Peach Blow, Peach Glass, Peach Skin, Coral, Wild Rose for peachblow).  If you followed the rule strictly, it would mean you can't generalize when the maker is unknown.  And it can become very confusing!  It's just not practical to separate glassmaking history from the history of selling, collecting and writing because they are intertwined.  It's already difficult enough to communicate when words mean different things in US vs. UK English...add to that different terminology among the glassmakers, or at different points in the history of a single glassmaker, and it would cause all kinds of misunderstanding.  Why reject a term like "vaseline" when it has a long history and means a specific thing to many, many people, just because it wasn't used by a glassmaker?

Bernard, you mention your comments about raw materials representatives spreading knowledge.  I disagree - glass companies often kept their formulas secret.  Sometimes only a single person was allowed to add colorants to a batch.

(BTW, Hajdamach's description of American peachblow, "The 'Peach Blow' version made by American factories was identical to Locke's and Webb's glass in that they all used a base layer of cream coloured glass which was cased with the heat sensitive layer," is not correct.  Mt. Washington's Peach Blow and New England's Wild Rose were both single-layer. )

Whew!  There's my two cents.

[butchiedog]

Kristi,

"If you followed the rule strictly, it would mean you can't generalize when the maker is unknown.  And it can become very confusing!"

Okay;  so many questions at once;  I suppose my answers are going to sound rather preachy, but keep in mind that my answers are about what I would do and how I feel about certain things. I am not evangelizing, so please keep that in mind if you read this.

JMOho;  If I do not know who the maker is, then I simply admit to myself that  I don't know who the maker is, fact is fact and it's okay to not know who the maker is and then face the challenge of finding out sometime in the future. Making up information, based on what I know about something else in order to superficially say that something is what I wish it were or hope it is. For me to do that would be lying to myself and I  I believe a person who lies to themselves is worse than one who lies to others. I guess my point is;  take your time and enjoy collecting, find out what you can when you can, rather than allow a habit of instant gratification to rule your life and rob you of all of the enjoyment in collecting, not just the part of accumulating things.

Still JMOho; To answer a bunch of your other questions;  Why remain stuck in a state of arrested development?

Just because something made up or wrong has been the way things were done for so long is no reason to not accept the new found facts and begin to drop using all of the incorrect information. 

Collecting, like every other subject should evolve and we should strive to get better at it, which means updating and discarding the old myths, made up names and misconceptions for something more accurate whenever possible. If one isn't striving to get better at collecting then all they are doing is accumulating things and that's not collecting, it's just hoarding.

Selling is another thing and collectors should never allow sellers to make the rules for how collectors collect. What I am posting here is from a collector's point of view only and I suppose some sellers won't like it, because changing anything may mean more work for them, but work is what having a job means.

"Why reject a term like "vaseline" when it has a long history and means a specific thing to many, many people, just because it wasn't used by a glassmaker?"

Because Vaseline is the name of a greasy medicinal ointment for one and my other reason is that Vaseline Glass  and the whole goofy black light thing is more of a superficial fad thing, like Beanie Baby collecting and Disco. Sorry if my saying that steps on someone's sacred cow, but I don't worship cows and I'm just being honest, so again it's my own opinion, not my rule.

Okay now;  The uranium oxide in the glass gives it it's color. It does nothing to improve the quality of the glass, the basic glass making ingredients, their purity etc., are what determine that. Flowers in a vase made of this glass do not last longer, food served on a dish made of this glass does not taste any better and does not go stale any slower. I could go on and on, but I don't think I need to. The point here is;  the item is glass and the glass was not made out of Vaseline, but silica etc., so the term Vaseline Glass itself is inane and only makes those who use the name sound rather uneducated, so what better reason to finally get around to rejecting such a swap-meet term and improving our glass speak vocabulary.

Yes;   collecting and learning it often is difficult, but that's what makes it all worth doing. Otherwise one may as well buy and collect Franklin Mint, Bradford Exchange and or the products of any other company who decides for you that their wares are collectables.

Ready, Aim, Fire! lol! --- Mike

[Ohio]

Kristi...yes we've had a discussion or two pertaining to "Coralene" which was enjoyable as our most of our dicussions. I admit I have a rather prejudicial view to the term "Vaseline" when it applies to glass on our side of the pond. The Europeans in my opinion have always been far more accurate using the term "Uranium" glass than we have in the US. At least they accurately recognize something regarding glass chemistry while we on the other hand recognize something our Mothers (well mine anyway) shoved up our nose when we had a cold to prevent our skin cracking.

I do not care if the term is catchy or whether or not its widely accepted & I cringe whenever I hear any US glass manufacturers of the Depression of Elegant eras colors referred to as Vaseline. Not a single solitary US manufacturer of those eras referred to any of their colors as Vaseline. The Vaseline crowd seems determined that only those colors that are yellow/green should be considered because they are so infactuated with the reaction when in fact colors such as Cambridge's Willow Blue which also had Uranium Oxide in the formula glows almost as brightly as their defined yellow/green colors. Here is what you will not find...you will not find many (if any) members of numerous National US glass manufacturer collector groups (insert names here) refer to any of their manufacturers colors as vaseline, therefore it is inaccurate to use vaseline as a primary descriptive noun regarding US glass manufactured during the Depression or Elegant periods.

My opinion only of course although it is I do believe shared by more than a few. Ken