It's really quite rare to find lilac opaline glass. I've been hunting for a piece, but it also had to have white enamelling on it, to fit in with my collection
You often find blue, green, white or black opaline, and sometimes clambroth or a grey or taupe colour. Rarely to be seen are lilac, pink or yellow. And it's not very often at all that you find opaline enamelled with only white enamel.
This is an oil lamp I bought yesterday.
The base is a lavender colour opaline and the font is more a lilac colour. The enamelling is white leaves and flowers and it's Bohemian.
The colours are gorgeous. It's possibly a marriage because of the difference in colours, or it may be the the shade might have originally been a match for the base with the font being a contrasting lilac. If it is a marriage I suspect it would have been done very early on in it's life because finding any lilac opaline glass is rare, never mind a font to match a base on an oil lamp. It's also possible that 'matching' exactly wasn't always worried about when these were originally made, so it may have left the maker like this I guess.
Both font and base glow red when held up to the sun
- my pic's not that great but you can see the glow on the left hand side. It also shows up the transparency of the glass, which can't be seen when photographing it from the front because both pieces are 'closed' unlike a vase which would be open at the top to let light through.
The glass is actually very transparent in reality - you can see in the next pics that you are able to read a newspaper headline through it.
It fits perfectly into my small 19th century opaline glass collection
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Topic: 19th century Lilac opaline glass lamp and pics of opaline glass c1840-1870 ish (Read 514 times)
