Glass Message Board
Glass Identification - Post here for all ID requests => Glass => Topic started by: Pinkspoons on April 24, 2010, 09:22:39 PM
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I really can't work out if this glass is terribly old... or terribly new and just very badly made.
The glass is decidedly off-white, the bowl and foot are quite bubbly, the stem is off-centre where it connects to the foot - which isn't surprising as the foot isn't quite circular (see final image).
It has lots of tooling marks, and the rim appears to have been cut off with shears with minimal effort to fire-polish it.
It has some weight to it, for it's size - it's size being 4.5" / 105mm tall.
Any ideas?
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Hi Nic,
Is the colouration of your images accurate?
Obviously I'm sure that you are aware that 'antique' drinking glasses tend to have a green, grey or blue colour cast, but your images appear crystal clear.
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Entirely hand made without using so much as a clapper to get the foot right - but the difference in glass quality between stem and bowl makes me think it is a new item.
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Thanks for the comments.
David, I described the colour as 'off-white', but I should have been a little less ambiguous. Sorry. I meant that it is grey. Quite a bit greyer, in fact, than my sole piece of genuinely old glass - a carafe from the first half of the 1800s.
Ivo, the stem is a little seedy - just not as much as the bowl. The foot is the same, containing only a few bubbles. That said, the bowl does have some large areas, probably just under half of the surface area, that are lacking significant amounts of bubbles too.
Hopefully the last image shows the stem a little more clearly - and I've also tried to make the colour as 'true' as possible (although my photo set-up is backlit, which tends to knock out subtler shades of grey in clear glass).
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I have 9 old lower-quality glasses similar to these and those have loads of striations and spurious marks but barely a dozen bubbles between them. Those are mostly in the feet and seem the result of handling the glass during rather than being in the metal. I would go for repro
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Repro was my first instinct, but I know too little about this area of glass-making to make any properly educated guesses.
I do, however, seem to remember reading that when the fad of recreating old bubbly glass came after the turn of the last century they were a little artistically licentious in their reproduction, as the eras they were copying were never actually very bubble-filled at all - but, subsequently, the view that they were has never quite died out amongst glassmakers going for an "antique" look.
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I can't really be of much help.
I would have gone with repro or 30s. The glass also reminded me of work produced by Paul Barcroft.
Having said that, I would say that the tool-work and quality would rule these out (I think).
I don't like saying this but with the quality in mind, it does remind me of the sort of cheap glasses you find in continental supermarkets. I hope this isn't the case, but you never know.
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I don't know if the fact that it's totally handmade would rule it out as continental supermarket glass? The roughness of the rim alone would probably fail it on health and safety regulations. Although, yes, the quality is decidedly dubious.
I've nothing invested in it one way the other - it's just excess glass from an auction joblot. If it's old, then bonus, if not, then it can go on the carboot pile along with 75% of the glass that came with it. ;D
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The only reason I considered continental supermarket glass is the fact that they sometimes source local products that could be hand-made rather than mass produced in a factory. Also, they don't seem to be as concerned about H & S as we are in the UK - I've seen some pretty shocking examples of glass sold in Portuguese and Spanish supermarkets.
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Fair enough comment.
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Supermarket glass? Wha's tha? With multimillion factories lik Arques, Pasabahce or Bormioli churning out boxes of domestic glass for less than a euro per six, who sells expensive caliper finished goblets?
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All I can say is that I have seen similar (not such good quality) hand-made items in supermarkets - usually the smaller non-franchise kind.
Take it or leave it, I'm not exactly stating that this is the best or most likely origin of the glass. Thinking about it some more, most of the 'supermarket glass' I have seen is usually quite light, so the weight of this glass alone rules out this explanation.
It's probably more likely to be a second and the tool markings etc aren't typical.
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It reminds me a little of Mexican recycled glass, all hand made, available in Oxfam-style shops a few years ago. Perhaps that's the sort of thing David means?
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One of the things that's drawing me away from 'brand new' glass is that if it were cheaply made for low-end retail markets, would they have gone to the effort of producing them in a pretty convincing antique shape using glass with just the right kind of grey tinge to it?
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I think that one of the things that makes it difficult to date is the marriage between a more traditional stem and and modern bowl.
Having said that, I have seen 18th and 19th century drinking glasses that look surprisingly contemporary in design.
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Have you checked it with a UV light? I would expect it to contain manganese and glow dull yellow green if genuinely UV-greyed
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I'll check it out during the next bout of photography. :)
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HI All , Having just read through this thread I thought I would add my tuppence worth , I think I have to agree with previous comments that suggest modern, more than likely recycled glass, I have seen similar made in Gibraltar and I would also agree with a possible Mexican origin too ,all glass with this type of bubbly metal that i have seen in the past has had a modern origin and I have never come across anything like them that could be given a pre 20thc date,
Not great news but I hope it helps,
Cheers ,
Peter.