Topic: Pressed glass custard cups rough pontil help please.

[brucebanner]

Can anyone explain what's going on here and a rough age date please.

Three part mould with a rough snapped pontil. The outer glass is rough and sharp.

3 inches in height.

Regards Chris.

[brucebanner]

A shot of the pattern.

[Paul S.]

I'd imagine this was possibly one of the more common pressed patterns for custards  -  I have a couple and they seem to be identical to those posted here - one of mine has a very sharp pontil scar.     
Looking at collections of such items, produced over a long period of time, it might be true to say that the majority were blown, with handles attached separately, rather than mould pressed as an all-in-one object.         Custards and jellies pre-date pressed glass by many years, and quality examples were still being blown long after pressed glass started.
Then again I have mould made custards - showing seams - with handles attached separately - so such objects seem to show the complete range of manufacturing processes.

As you'd expect, mould made pieces incorporating handles show seams, one of which almost always runs mid way in line with the handle for obvious reasons, since otherwise you couldn't extract the glass from the mould.                 As far as I'm aware it's the need to remove seam lines, by fire polishing, that gives rise to the pontil scar on these pieces where, subsequent to the act of pressing, the item would have been held on a pontil rod and returned to the glory hole for polishing.            However, seams lower on the object, especially the feet, seem nearly always to remain visible  -  probably a practical issue - heating too close to the foot my have been unwise.
Not quite sure of the comment   "The outer glass is rough and sharp."    this may suggest these particular pieces were insufficiently fire polished     ...........   my examples have crisp moulding, but don't seem overly sharp.       

Prior to around 1870, all glass that required finishing or fire polishing was held on a pontil rod via the foot, and whereas after polishing the scar was removed on quality items, some utility pressed pieces such as this custard were left with a rough scar - simple economics probably - although the majority of custards and jellies seem not to be left with a rough scar.
Subsequently, the gadget made the pontil rod redundant on many lesser quality items, which is why the underside of feet on some pressed glass (and many jellies and custards with blown bowls) show the 'Y' mark left by the shears............    I could be wrong, but the desire to avoid the sharp scar and consequent time consuming grinding polishing, appears to have been the reason for the change from pontil rod to gadget.       Marks left by the gadget (on the top side of the foot) are seen only very rarely, although there are pix on the Board, somewhere.

As for dating these particular custards, I think the pontil scar is misleading us, and despite the date of the invention of the gadget, in my opinion is these date from somewhere in the first third of the C20 - not earlier.
The assumption has to be that for whatever particular reason their place of manufacture decided that using a pontil rod to fire polish was more expedient that a gadget.
And this give rise to an unanswered question.........    how were these custards removed from the mould and attached to the pontil rod, bearing in mind they would have been red hot??             Might they have been made in an inverted mould to assist in attaching the rod?? 

[Paul S.]

hopefully some corroboration of my earlier comments.

Picture attached of a pressed custard which has a real chance of being from Inwald's (Czechoslovakia) 'Lord' range, designed by Schrotter and launched some time around 1920.        Of course I could be wrong, but features such as the ground and very highly polished outer foot rim, plus the lens pattern and scalloped edging to the foot  -  are all characteristics of 'Lord' pieces.            Unfortunately, I don't know the pressing process by which the outer rim was created, but it certainly was ground then polished to a mirror finish  -  the 'Lord' range came to the U.K. via Clayton Mayers, in the 1930's, and was produced by Davidson under the trade name of 'Jacobean'.              Most pieces made by Davidson incorporate the name 'Jacobean' in relief somewhere on the glass - often the foot area - and the absence of the name on this custard suggests Czechoslovakia rather than the U.K.
None of the 'Lord' pieces I've seen have been left with a pontil scar  -  due no doubt to the higher quality of this range, but the similarity with the other pressed custards here is nonetheless fairly obvious.
Since this 'Lord' custard would not have been made prior to about 1920, it's similarity to the un-named pressed custard might help to confirm my suggestion of an early C20 date, rather than the C19.

The lick shown is very basic in quality (far more so than the 'Lord' custard) - was made in a two part mould (this might be accounted for by the absence of a handle), and has been fire polished to the extent of removing the seams from the bowl.      As with the earlier custards, the lick was polished by means of attachment to pontil rod, and subsequently the scar was removed by grinding/polishing as can be seen in the picture of the foot.

Again, the heyday of the lick was probably c. 1900 - 1920, and CH says they had mostly been banned by c. 1930. 

Slack comments that there was apparently (albeit in the 1860/70 period) strong resistance from workers to using the gadget  -  and it could be that this aversion to new practices lived on for much longer than we suppose, giving rise to pieces with sharp pontil scars at much later dates than has previously been thought.

Of course these are my opinions only  -  feel free to criticize and disagree with in part or full

[brucebanner]

Thanks for the explanation Paul, very interesting.