Hi folks,
I have been browsing messages about the V Nason Company for a while. It's not a maker I know anything about, other than what I read here and see occasionally in other sites. However, David's pics made me sit up and say, "Aha!"
The "splashed" vase (wrong term, I reckon, but it's the best I can do at 4:40am) that David shows is something I know from my own items but for which I had never found an attribution.
I have to say that I prefer the shape of my pair of vases:
http://tinypic.com/kewymw.jpgBut it's the sameness of the colouring that's important here. Are these definitely V Nason?
And then David's blue vase struck me as having some close similarity with a strange-shaped blue vase that I have. In the pic below, it is shown with a green opaline vase that I had always assumed was French - I'll come back to that in a moment.
The blue, handled vase seems to have a common form with the body-to-neck section of David's blue vase. And it seems to me that the colouring and depth of the opaline is reasonably consistent, too. So maybe my handled vase is also V Nason? (But I am well aware of the dangers, as pointed out quite often in here, of making bold leaps of assumptions based on similar looks.)
Blue vase & Greeen vase
http://tinypic.com/kewz1v.jpgThe green vase is also opaline and the thing about this one is that it has the same type of white opaline foot as mentioned by David and seen also in my pair of "splahed" vases. This type of foot is indistinguishable from one on a (more solid) white opaline vase I have that is acid etched on the underside of the foot: "Sevres FRANCE". It was this, amongst other reasons, that led me to wonder whether amy other of my pieces with that milky-white foot could also be French, Until I saw messages in this board, I had never even heard of V Nason.
In connection with the "fire" effect of trasmitted light, seen in the feet of items like these, my Sevres vase, although being thicker and heavier than my other oplaline pieces, is allover white and shows the golden "fire" effect very well throughout all of the body as well as the foot. I have always thought the effect to be simply the reaction that transmitted light has on the "bone-ash / arsenic" mixture of opaline. But I had never wondered any deeper why it reacted in this way - I assume it's something to do with the excitement of the atoms. [Another thread somewhere has mentioned the "fireglo" (or "fireglow") glass that the American Boston & Sandwich company made as a deliberate marketing strategy based on this "fire" effect of opaline.]