While looking for the flint glass creamer and sugar in yellow uranium (see my other current post), I came across a photo in NINETEETH CENTURY BRITISH GLASS by Hugh Wakefield, copyright 1961 & 1982, 2nd printing by Faber & Faber.
http://www.vaselineglass.org/regencymug.jpgIn reading the text below the picture, this style was done in 1825, but I also know that uranium glass did not come along for a little over 10-15 years from that date. The text on pages 60 & 62 talked about how Central Europe was making glass in the Biedermeier style (during the 1820s-1840s). "By the forties [1840s], however, the potential interest in coloured and opaline glasses, and in their adjuncts of painting and gilding, was becoming irresistible. Quite suddenly the British manufacturers responded wholeheartedly to the demand for colour and began to make a belated contribution to the international Biedermeier styles. In this movement one personality stood out before all others, that of Benjamin Richardson, of the Stourbridge firm of W. H., B & J. Richardson, who was later to be referred to as 'the father of the glass trade' [Pottery Gazette 1888 pg. 50]. In an exhibition held in Manchester at the end of the very year in which the excise had been removed, the Richardson display included clear coloured, opaline, layered and painted pieces. In this the firm was foreshadowing most of the methods of using colour which ewere to occupy a great part of its efforts, and the efforts of other firms, during the few crowded years up to the Great Exhibition of 1851."
".....The culmination of the fashion came with the 1851 Exhibition, at which nearly all of the glass manufacturers of standing were showing some coloured wares. The OFFICIAL DESCRIPTIVE AND ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUE of the exhibition lists the colors to be found on the stands of three of them -- Davis, Greathead & Green of Stourbridge, Rice Harris, and Bacchus. The list of Rich Harris is slightly the longest and is given as 'opal, alabaster, turquoise, amber, canary, topaz, chrysoprase, pink, blue, light and dark ruby, black, brown, green, purple, etc. Most newspaper and magazine critics of the work of the British glassmakers at the various exhibitions around 1850 were inclined to find their coloured glass promising but not yet quite the equal of Bohemian glass. This would not in any case be surprising, in view of the short period during which the British manufacturers had been seriously concerned with coloured glass. Some of the colour was used in a manner which was unmistakably British; but often the style of the coloured and opaline work was scarcely distinguishable from that of Bohemia or France."
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I am just speculating that this REGENCY MUG was most likely made in England, sometime between when uranium colorants were introduced, up to the time period when REGENCY style cutting was phased out for more complicated cuttings. According to Charles Hajdamach (BRITISH GLASS 1800-1914), the REGENCY period of glass cutting lasted until the 1820s, but the earliest indication of uranium glass being used in Britain was 1837, shown on colour plate #4 in Hajdamach's book (pg. 57), which was part of a suite of glass used by Queen Victoria at her first banquet in the City of London.
What I am trying to figure out is the approximate time period when my REGENCY cut uranium mug might have been made. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated!Mr. Vaseline Glass
p.s. I got the mug at this year's big Antique Glass show in Harrisburg, PA in April, 2008. The seller told me it was de-acquisitioned from a museum in Michigan that closed in the 1920s. It still has an acquisition number on the bottom of the mug.
Topic: REGENCY CUT uranium yellow mug (Read 2270 times)
