Glass Message Board
Glass Identification - Post here for all ID requests => Glass => Topic started by: madweasel on February 28, 2018, 05:23:16 PM
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Hi
This item comes from an archaeological excavation in the UK, found in a layer at the interface between Roman and modern (19th century plus) disturbance. There is a little bit of bog-standard Roman glass there but no early modern/modern material. It has me quiet stumped.
Does anyone recognise this decorative style - an applied tricorn shaped tooled prunt with the pressed 'raspberry' design? I sense it is late 19th century or later. Any help most appreciated.
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Hi madweasel, welcome to the Board.
I suspect it may take a while before anyone offers a guess about the fascinating piece of something. But there are some members who might have some ideas.
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It is a very interesting bit of something. Thanks for such good photographs!
I can see that the wall of the vessel (or whatever) it was placed on was sloping gently, and that the tricorn bit stands proud of it.
It's not quite so clear what the exact colour of the metal is, I can see a greeny yellowy hue, but am not sure if that's just the way the light has caught it?
Can you give us a description of the "colour" of the clear?
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Hi. Thanks for such a quick response. The colour of the fragment in the top image - 8305 - is the best match to the real piece. A greenish yellow, with the emphasis on the greenish, hue sums it up nicely.
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I really am fairly clueless, but knowing the correct colour might help others who are more familar with glass items from antiquity.
Recipes for glass changed over the years, different recipes give rise to different shades of clear glass.
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Similar of sorts on this large urn, rectangular rather than triangular and chimera instead of berry prunt. The urn would probably date to the 1860s, made in Murano, worth noting that some designs were revisited over several centuries there.
A lot of Murano glass was sold in London in the late C19, very trendy for a while.
John
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there looks to be an absence of 'glass sickness' - that iridescent surface discolouration that appears frequently on older material where the glass has been buried in 'soil' for some considerable time - so the conclusion could be that this fragment is perhaps more modern than is suggested??
When we say "19th century plus" - is there the possibility of material as recent as mid C20 - or even later? - and my thoughts re the yellow/greenish colour of the glass might be that this item is of a soda glass composition rather than a lead glass - greyish/bluish hues tend to be associated with lead glass. Perhaps depending on which type of glass is buried, then perhaps one or the other is affected more by the type of soil, leading to more or less deterioration of the glass surface - regret my knowledge of how glass is affected by either acid or alkaline soils is zero.
Glass items that surface when digging C19 and early C20 dumps almost always show sickness to some degree, and rather obviously the older the deposit the more likely it is to be affected more heavily by iridescence - in the Surrey Wealden (Chiddingfold) areas where the very early C16 French Huguenot's set up their vagrant glass making sites, some of the pieces I've picked up are the most beautiful I've seen, and you can understand why modern makers have tried to copy that beauty - it's also very thin and fragile - and can often be found lying on the surface. Pre Mr. Ravenscroft too, so almost certainly all soda glass.
Sorry, not the remotest idea of the history or age, or anything, of this piece - would it help if we knew the location (not specific) from whence this piece was found?
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John, do you think it might have been some form of applied flower with the tooled 'feet' where it was applied to the body of the piece , then the flower petals (which have now broken off) with a prunt in the middle?
Something like this type of glass?
https://caroleallaire.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/1e-venetian-salviate-goblet.jpg?w=270&h=523
info on it here
https://ancientglass.wordpress.com/category/categories-of-glass-types-on-this-site/3-european-glass/page/3/
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Similar yes, the applied cartouche (for want of a better description) looks like it has 2 pulled corners. There are a couple more examples in the Stanford book of decoration in the form of applied cartouche with pulled corners and a prunt (on pages 98 and 121).
Not sure about petals being broken off as I can't see any sign of them. Back to the Stanford book again, there are some flowers on a vase in the manner that you describe (page 100) but they don't have the cartouche bit between them and the body of the vessel.