Topic: Venetian style small tazza - please help with attribution

[Bernard C]

Back to my little tazza or compote.

At Leeds on Sunday I had a long conversation with an established and knowledgeable Whitefriars collector about my tazza, which I had on display.

We spent some time comparing it to a 3-piece construction Walsh Vesta Venetian vase, a late example dating from about 1920 (Vesta Venetian was launched in 1907, although that could have been just when Walsh decided to make it a formal named product line).

Although the tazza has a large, slightly flattened ball knop, and the vase has a merese or bladed knop, the two stems are remarkably similar in both technique and proportion, and could have been made by the same man.

It is, of course, most unlikely that this is the case, although the green is a close match to contemporary Walsh green, and Walsh were certainly making a similar opaque white.

So what could be an explanation.    Perhaps what matters is not the individual glassmaker, but how he was trained.    As far as I am aware all the Stourbridge group of glassworks (including Walsh and possibly Whitefriars) apprentices were trained at either the Wordsley or Stourbridge Schools of Art.   What we could have been examining was the style of the principal glassmaking tutor at one of these two colleges.

Compare with Jackson in 20th Century Factory Glass on Michael Harris and Mdina:

The reason for choosing Malta for their enterprise was that there was no tradition of glassmaking on the island: Harris preferred to train apprentices from scratch so that they would be free from bad habits and preconceptions.

So Michael Harris was convinced that techniques learned during apprenticeship would be difficult to change.

Therefore it seems to me that, on the balance of probability, this little tazza or compote is most likely to be a Stourbridge production, using the term in its wider sense to include the two geographically distant glassworks.

I am also grateful to an experienced American dealer, whose immediate reaction to the photograph was that it is English.

Has anyone any further views on this, as I plan to list it on eBay in the near future.

Bernard C.  

[Bernard C]

Hi everyone.

Yet another complete turnaround in attribution.

I showed this tazza/comport/compote to Roger Dodsworth and the team at Broadfield House yesterday.

Roger appreciated my points about construction technique, and agreed that stylistically 1920 plus or minus a decade or so looks right, but pointed out that the glass itself is wrong for an English manufacturer.    There is no lead in it.

He prefers a mainland European attribution.  I am now going along with that.   I don't hold out much hope of anything better.

Bernard C.