Topic: Wonky bubbly drinking glass - antique or repro?

[Pinkspoons]

I really can't work out if this glass is terribly old... or terribly new and just very badly made.

The glass is decidedly off-white, the bowl and foot are quite bubbly, the stem is off-centre where it connects to the foot - which isn't surprising as the foot isn't quite circular (see final image).

It has lots of tooling marks, and the rim appears to have been cut off with shears with minimal effort to fire-polish it.

It has some weight to it, for it's size - it's size being 4.5" / 105mm tall.

Any ideas?

[David Hier]

Hi Nic,

Is the colouration of your images accurate?

Obviously I'm sure that you are aware that 'antique' drinking glasses tend to have a green, grey or blue colour cast, but your images appear crystal clear.

[Ivo]

Entirely hand made without using so much as a clapper to get the foot right - but the difference in glass quality between stem and bowl makes me think it is a new item.

[Pinkspoons]

Thanks for the comments.

David, I described the colour as 'off-white', but I should have been a little less ambiguous. Sorry. I meant that it is grey. Quite a bit greyer, in fact, than my sole piece of genuinely old glass - a carafe from the first half of the 1800s.

Ivo, the stem is a little seedy - just not as much as the bowl. The foot is the same, containing only a few bubbles. That said, the bowl does have some large areas, probably just under half of the surface area, that are lacking significant amounts of bubbles too.

Hopefully the last image shows the stem a little more clearly - and I've also tried to make the colour as 'true' as possible (although my photo set-up is backlit, which tends to knock out subtler shades of grey in clear glass).

[Lustrousstone]

I have 9 old lower-quality glasses similar to these and those have loads of striations and spurious marks but barely a dozen bubbles between them. Those are mostly in the feet and seem the result of handling the glass during rather than being in the metal. I would go for repro

[Pinkspoons]

Repro was my first instinct, but I know too little about this area of glass-making to make any properly educated guesses.

I do, however, seem to remember reading that when the fad of recreating old bubbly glass came after the turn of the last century they were a little artistically licentious in their reproduction, as the eras they were copying were never actually very bubble-filled at all - but, subsequently, the view that they were has never quite died out amongst glassmakers going for an "antique" look.

[David Hier]

I can't really be of much help.

I would have gone with repro or 30s. The glass also reminded me of work produced by Paul Barcroft.

Having said that, I would say that the tool-work and quality would rule these out (I think).

I don't like saying this but with the quality in mind, it does remind me of the sort of cheap glasses you find in continental supermarkets. I hope this isn't the case, but you never know.

[Pinkspoons]

I don't know if the fact that it's totally handmade would rule it out as continental supermarket glass? The roughness of the rim alone would probably fail it on health and safety regulations. Although, yes, the quality is decidedly dubious.

I've nothing invested in it one way the other - it's just excess glass from an auction joblot. If it's old, then bonus, if not, then it can go on the carboot pile along with 75% of the glass that came with it.

[David Hier]

The only reason I considered continental supermarket glass is the fact that they sometimes source local products that could be hand-made rather than mass produced in a factory. Also, they don't seem to be as concerned about H & S as we are in the UK - I've seen some pretty shocking examples of glass sold in Portuguese and Spanish supermarkets.

[Pinkspoons]

Fair enough comment.