Topic: Georgian ? Victorian port bottle decanter help please.

[brucebanner]

I think this has some real age but i'm struggling to find anything similar. The pontil has snapped and a good 3 mm is still sticking out the base, heavy wear to the base rim and the bottle is misshapen and roughly made, no seeds and the glass is very thick about 5mm. The base is domed inwards.

I've struggled to take a half decent picture.

It's 9 1/2 inches in height and 3 1/2 inches across the base.

Any help with a rough date and what the stopper would have looked like would be good.

regards Chris.

[Paul S.]

hi Chris ..   my suggestion of shape would be a shoulder, and I'd put my money on the stopper having been a spire, although might possibly have been disc/lozenge.

Date wise this could be c. 1755 - 1775, assuming it's genuine and not made to look old, and one of the aids to dating is that the more substantial the 'kick' (your domed inwards base), then the earlier the piece.
Apparently there was a fashion for these early shouldered pieces to have the cartouche in the shape/style as here, and it was used for most beverages on these clear decanters, disappearing about 1780.

Kevin has a lot of decanters, let's see what he thinks

[brucebanner]

Thanks for the reply Paul, you may think i'm going crazy but for some reason old glass gets very dirty quickly with finger marks and grease, this decanter has seen a lot of use it has various levels of clouding to the interior, (but then i have seen that in modern ones). There are marks around the outer shoulder, the interior base has scratches, it just feels old.

It would be lovely to think it's that old as you suggested.

[Paul S.]

Andy McConnell's book is an obvious choice with which to learn much about these things, since it concentrates on decanters, but I know it's pricey.
The other suggestion if you have queries and don't have immediate access to an appropriate book is to send couple of good pix to the glass department at the V. & A. in London ..  ceramicsandglass@vam.ac.uk 
They don't guarantee an answer, and sometimes might take a week to reply, but my experience of them has usually been good.

Pix of clear glass need to avoid fussy backgrounds of differing colours etc......     a plain uniformly dark background is best, with angled light, and possibly best lit from behind if you can.

Certainly the shoulder was fashionable in the period I suggested, as was that particular shaped cartouche, and the same may be said of the kick.            The amount of wear looks to suggest substantial age, but as we know the Victorians copied just about everything, so difficult to be certain, although not sure that they copied these things.

Let's hope we get an expert to have a look.