Glass Message Board

Some more pictures in different angles.

Thank you again Allan. Your willingness to share your expertise is greatly appreciated!

Thanks Allan. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to reply and share your knowledge. In hopes of learning even a little more, are there certain canes in this paperweight that are unique to Baccarat? Also, are there features that help date this piece to the Dupont period specifically? Sorry for the additional questions. I'm trying to learn. Thanks again!

This article  is from:
 Source -
glassmaking-in-London.co.uk Industries
LONDON GLASS CUTTERS & ENGRAVERS c.1793
by Peter Lole (Article from Glass Circle News no. 78. 1999, p. 6)
http://www.glassmaking-in-london.co.uk/industries

It is regarding 1793 and 1794 (so 40 odd years before the bowls were apparently made for the Coronation banquet), and obviously the glass industry must have changed in the next 40 years of course - e.g. see the note regarding the drop in proportion of Excise Duty paid by London as a proportion of the whole English sum 40 years after 1793.  However, it's interesting regarding the number of people listed as glass-engravers as a proportion of the whole (very few) and for the fact that at that time 'London had half the Glass Engravers listed in the whole of England.'


'The most suprising feature was that clearly London in the early 1790s was still by far the most important domestic Glass centre in the country. It had more than twice as many cutters as the rest of England put together, and half the Glass Engravers listed in the whole of England. It had almost a third (19 out of a total of 66) of the Glasshouses and Glass Manufacturers listed, but forty years later the proportion of Excise Duty paid in London had dropped to only 2% of the total English sum of £680,000. (See: C.R.Hajdamach: British Glass 1800-1914 Pp 413-41) But this note is really directed only to Cutting and Engraving.'

It's possible things changed drastically in the intervening 40 years and the number of glass engravers increased but it's quite surprising how few engravers there were listed.

This was made by Baccarat during their Dupont period (approximately 1920s).  Popular lore attributes them paperweights to a Mr. Dupont, who supposedly was the last worker at Baccarat to know the secrets of paperweight making.  These paperweights were sold at a Baccarat retail shop in Paris.  No collector or scholar ever met Mr. Dupont although at least one visited the Baccarat factory and asked to meet with him.  The weights stopped appearing in the shop in 1934.  The last catalog to show this type of paperweight was 1902 although this information is old and later catalogs may have surfaced.  An internal Baccarat document dated 1910 stated that there were no longer any workers who knew how to make paperweights and none had been made in 30 years.  This contradicted their presence in the shop in Paris, so the internal document may have been to pacify management rather than representing the facts.  We know the names of several makers who could have made paperweights during the 1920s.