Glass Message Board
Glass Identification - Post here for all ID requests => Glass => Topic started by: Aislingeanbeag on May 18, 2013, 03:47:37 PM
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Here are a couple of what we have heard called spatter glass vases that arrived in a box lot and somehow stayed.
Rough snapped pontils suggest hand made a good few years ago and they are colourful.
Others we have seen tend to have a white glass cased lining however these seem straight of the pipe without the initial white.
Can anyone tell me where, when, who, on these?
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A bowl with that folded over crimped rim is called a "Rose Bowl".
I can't help with an id sorry!
I think this is tending towards what is sometiimes called cottage glass rather than spatter...
And I'd probably start looking somewhere in England before Bohemia.
Are the glittery bits aventurine or mica - or are there just lots of tiny bubbles in it?
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Seem to be mica to my ill-educated eye!
[The adventurine I pictured in Monart Royal Wedding Gift is bigger, sparkles more and has a more copper colour]
Looks like a clear 'gather' rolled in the coloured bits then blown.
Slightly uneven surface texture where the density of the colours varies from the clear.
I have never heard of cottage glass but that is of no consequence as I have never studied glass previously and rose bowls have always been our cut glass things with the metal grid covers!
Cheers
Dave
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Hi Dave, yes, like you, I always thought Rose Bowls were crystal glass with a metal grid until I joined the GMB.
This is quite an interesting article about rose bowls that you might like to bookmark for future use:
http://www.harrymcgee.2kseo.com/2011/antiquerosebowls.html
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Can anyone tell me how to differentiate between 'End of day' and 'Cottage' and 'Spatter' or is this 'Emporer's New clothes' terminology for the same thing?
Today I learned a little more and today I also did a rough count on our glassware collection.
Seems we have somewhere just over a thousand pieces!
I know a little about some however I beg your indulgence in advance as I can see an awful lot of questions!
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"End of Day" does not exist. ;D
It's a complete misnomer.
Somebody who had not a clue what they were talking about decided that at the "end of the day", there must have been glass melted still in the pot that needed "used up" before the heat on the pot was turned off for the night.
The pots do not get "turned off" at night. It would take too long for them to get hot again for the next day's work.
Spatter tends to describe work with round splodges on it, whereas the stuff called "cottage" tends to have more diffuse, worked-in splodges and perhaps other inclusions such as your mica or bubbles.
But there may well be somebody else who knows more than I do about cottage and spatter. :)
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End of the day glass is a term invented by the Antiques Trade, rather than glassworks'.
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quote..........."End of the day glass is a term invented by the Antiques Trade, rather than glassworks'."........... wouldn't doubt that for a minute Emmi, and like so many other things invented by that trade, it's best ignored. Raymond Slack makes no mention of the word, and Colin Lattimore describes it as a complete fallacy - as Sue says, there is no 'end' to the glass factory day. However, apparently slag glass did exist, and this is sometimes used as an interchangable description for end of day, although correctly this semi-opaque slag glass was only ever black or very dark green and seems not to have had a long production life (prior to the mid 1880's)
By the way, where do we look in the antiques trade for a provenance of your assertion as to the origin of this expresion?? ;) - Do you collect this type of glass?
quote..............."I have never heard of cottage glass"..................join the club Dave, neither have I ;D I've just tried a variety of dictionaries and books, and unable to find a reference for the use of this word in the sense of a spatter/splatter multi-coloured glass with inclusions of mica and aventurine.
However - something else I didn't know..........there was apparently a glass works in Lambeth, London, active c. 1860, called 'The Cottage Glass Works' so maybe the potential for some confusion there.
I've looked in what I'd assumed would be the obvious place to find expressions like spatter/splatter and 'worked-in-splodges', but Ruth A. Forsythe makes no mention of them. The lady uses only enameled, mottled and varicoloured - but does say these Czech. pieces include mica and aventurine. The decorative effect we call spatter/splatter seems to have been a common feature on Czech. tourist glass in the 1920 - 40 period.
So, I wonder who gave us spatter, splatter and splodges??
attractive rose bowl by the way, and thanks to Sue for the i.d.
Refs. Victorian Table Glass and Ornaments - Barbara Morris.
English Pressed Glass 1830 - 1900 - Raymond Slack
English 19th-Century Press Moulded Glass - Colin R. Lattimore
Made in Czechoslovakia - Ruth A. Forsythe.
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There were several articles about cottage glass published in an American magazine by a British collector. Craig is now in touch with him and would be better placed than me to explain what this is so I shall leave it to him. :)
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I have read part of an article about 'Cottage' written by a John Franks and published in 1997 which describes part of his collection.
There appears to be a copy for sale here
http://www.tomfolio.com/otherdetailssu.asp?b=91-0226&m=519
It struck me that the term was an invention but who am I to say.
The internet tends to cause any terms used to proliferate as they pass from site to site and pass into folklore much as the 'Oral tradition' used to work [That system of oral transmission as regards Folksong has now been corrupted by recorded music]
Googling any term seems to generate duplicate hits that bear a striking resemblance to each other but the source should perhaps be treated with a degree of skepticism.
As regards 'End of Day' A tale I was told regarding Moncrief's was that at the end of shift, or perhaps week, apprentices and others having completed their tasks were allowed to make something of their own to show their skills!
Again I suspect that those who attempt to sell old pieces of dubious provenance would encourage such a tale! ::)
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found a reference to "end of Day" in a book 1966 Glass Paperweights of the Bergstrom Collection. It stated it was was much like "macedoines". Lots of random chips or cane pieces that were used to make pieces randomly at the end of the production shift. These were normally strewn on the marver and rather than sort them or swish them away, they gathered them into a "conglomerate" of color.
I personally have done this many times as I may have used many colors of frit in a day making numerous pieces and at the end just pick a lot of them up together and make something of them.
Other books mention this technique using just 2 or 3 colors of frit decoration a being "mottled".
I think the splatter/splotches term has come down from the ceramics trade that used this technique for decorating and it was literally splattered glaze on the piece of ceramic. many times done with flipping a brush full of glaze at the piece or sometimes done in other ways.
The risk in actually combining all of these colors is that many will crack eventually because they have glasses that are not compatible with each other, i.e. different COE's, or different viscosities that don't allow them to adhere to one another correctly. Some shapes are more forgiving of this than others and will keep the glass under tension or compression and give better results. Some glasses will actually change their COE's dramatically every time they are reheated in the glory hole. Looking at some old glasses under a polariscope will show stress that you'd wish you'd never seen. Many new pieces will exhibit some of the same tendencies as well. Combining multicolors is not an easy process. Opaque colors, reds, oranges, pinks, yellows are the most notorious for not matching others. I have some pieces in my collection that I've had over 40 years and have noticed just recently that they have finally cracked. they may be 75+ years old or more.
I know, more info than you ever wanted for a small "rose bowl".
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So I have read through the thread and here is what I would add to all of this.
1) I agree that "End of the day" is a non existent "decor", and likely a term popularized by people that did not understand glass and how it is produced. Their knowledge lacked the understanding of rolling a gather in colored shards to create a desired decor. Hence, "End of day for all of those pieces of broken glass and remnants at close of business. Nice concept, completely wrong, and has "stuck" to the degree it will likely never ever disappear.... Kinda like Tango glass and Michael Powolny.... an insurmountable internet myth....
2) "Spatter glass", to me is simply another term for "end of the Day" and simply is a descriptive term applied to a decor containing a variety of colors with no apparent pattern to their application.... in other words, they look like paint that was "spattered" on. Likely a second term that has nothing to do with glass production, and everything to do with describing something to sell it.... at least originally...... now it seems to be a commonly applied term to all kinds of multi-colored decors. This term and "End of the day" seem pretty randomly interchangeable depending on who is doing the description. "Spatter" type decors were made in a huge variety of countries.
3) "Cottage glass": This appears to be a term applied to what at the time was believed to be Stourbridge production. As far as I can tell the term really first became popularized in the late 1990's with a series of articles in the "Glass Collectors Digest", a now defunct American bi-monthly publication. The term appears to have been applied by the Author John Franks to described production he believed to be "one off" production made at the end of the day by glass workers for family and friends. I would assume that this term would derive itself from the concept that this type of after hours production was a "cottage industry".
I am currently in contact with John Franks and he and I are discussing this glass and possible Bohemian origins for at least some of it.
It is my belief that at least a portion of what Franks described as Cottage glass was actually Bohemian glass, developed as a line of production tailored to British taste and imported heavily. I have identified a number of shapes in the Cottage Glass articles as being Welz production, and some of those shapes are also shown as Welz production in the photographic records of the 2012 Tango Exhibit which traveled in the Czech Republic.
This importation of Bohemian glass appears to have started as early as the 1880's and was done by at least one firm I have identified from US custom records. This type of glass is also found in large quantities in the UK, and found in very small quantities in the US market now. There is mention in an 1885 US Customs document of a firm by the name of Lazarus and Rosenfeld of London. It is stated in this Customs record that they not only imported glass to the US as the firm of Lazarus, Rosenfeld and Lehmann, but the firm based in London was also involved in the importation of Welz production to both the UK and also Australia.
So, to sum it up, IMHO, "Cottage Glass" is a term applied to production which in the 1990's was defined as being "one off" after hours Stourbridge production pieces produced by the workers, but is in large part glass that I now believe to have been produced by Franz Welz and imported to the UK by, at a minimum, the firm of Lazarus and Rosenfeld of London.
Hope this helps....
Craig
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thanks Craig for taking the time to write, and appreciate what is obviously something you have better knowledge of than those on our side of the pond.
Ref. 2/............re the spatter. As you say, a rather vague desriptive term that lacks technical accuracy - the problem is that it seems to have taken hold here in the U.K., and appears to have gained familiar status, especially for some of the gaudy eastern European less expensive glass made during the 1920 - 50 period. Here in the U.K. it is not interchangable with end of day - which is either uniformly plain coloured or marbled, and (obviously wrongly) is generally applied to glass from the second half of the C19. Like it or not, the word spatter does seem to be a useful word to describe the colourway.
Ref. 3/........Cottage Glass. As you will have gathered from my earlier words, I was unaware of what is obviously a very modern piece of descriptive terminology.
As far as the U.K. goes, it does appear that 'end of day' has been shown not to have substance at any time - certainly in the sense that most people use it.
I'm sure a lot of us in the U.K. would be very interested to hear from John Franks if he now has evidence to support this as being a bona fide Stourbridge practise.
My personal opinion is that the raising of new categories to define glass that probably already has adequate definition, is unhelpful, particularly as I indicated above that there was a genuine C19 London glasshouse bearing that name.
Look forward to hearing more, after your further discussions with John Franks - and again our thanks for your explanations. :)
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My pleasure Paul. In some initial discussions with Mr. Franks, there have been a couple of generalities stated which I would likely take exception to, but way too early in the discussions to go there. I am also not saying that all of his findings or observations were incorrect, only that some of the pieces he shows and owns are actually pretty solidly linked, IMHO, to Welz production. It will be an interesting discussion that will occur over an extended period at this point.
I also find to a degree, that we on this side of the pond have a tendency to use terms in a different manner. So it is really only that perspective from which I can speak.
I felt compelled to add....... As far as I am concerned we can never have "too much information" about anything.... ;D ;D
Craig
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compel away Craig ;D ;D
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I would say the rose bowl was most probably Bohemian. Cottage and end of day seem to my mind to be made up terms. Spatter is merely descriptive
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quote from Paul S.................."there was a genuine C19 London glasshouse bearing that name".
I've just discovered that this is not entirely true, so before the error runs away with itself and causes further confusion - I can clarify as follows:
According to David Watts web site 'A History of Glassmaking in London' - as here.... http://www.glassmaking-in-london.co.uk/later-glasshouses
- see section No. 24 - the name of the company was in fact John McLachlan, in Lambeth, London. As you can see, it is part of the address that reads 'Cottage Glass Works'.
Thanks to David Watts for providing this very informative site.
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Thank you to all !
My simplistic question seems to have been the key to a positive Pandora's box.
So my two small vases are in fact probably Bohemian and should be called rosebowls and probably date from the first half of the last century. They should be described as hand formed, blown glass, of random multicolour with mica in a clear gather.
However ......
They still fit nicely on the shelves either side of the small cabinet and we still like them so no change from last week!
Now where have we put those little 'Mary Gregory' jugs and things?