Topic: Burmese? ewer with enamel and gilt decoration — Id & date please

[Bernard C]

Images:-

Front

Angled to show gilding

Back

Detail

Relief detail

Pontil mark

A Burmese? style jug or ewer with some age to it, bought in the UK.   There is no significant reaction to my UV test lamp.   Note the height, exactly 8" (20.3cm).   There is some sharpness to the edge of the pontil scar.

The butterfly has an almost invisible outer boundary, probably originally gilt, that has two thin tails, like a swallowtail.   The four wing spots are blobs of ruby glass.   The foliage around the butterfly comprises hand-painted stems to which were fixed (presumably using some sort of enamel or gold paste) tiny pieces of opal glass that may have partly melted during the process of firing on the decoration.

The decoration is quite different to that produced at the Jules Barbe workshop for Thomas Webb, shown, for example, in Hajdamach Colour Plate 39 p317, and listed on pp433–4.

So, where was it made, Mount Washington, Thomas Webb, or elsewhere, and when?    And who decorated it?

Thanks for looking,

Bernard C. 

[Lustrousstone]

I don't think this is Burmese - Burmese certainly gives a very strong reaction to a UV light and the colour doesn't look right - perhaps peach blow

[Bernard C]

Christine — Thanks.   I just managed to add the question marks before being timed out!

Bernard C. 

[butchiedog]

Hi,

I don't know who or when, but it's not Burmese or Peachblow, but Cased Glass. --- Mike

[Lustrousstone]

According to Hajdamach Webb's peach glass (although this was amberina) was cased and there are similarities with this although how good the ID is I don't know

[butchiedog]

I don't know, 

I have a lot of this cased glass myself and I have never seen any good, convincing old documentation yet that says it was ever marketed as Peachblow, just websites and online auction sellers making the claim is all.

I have also been told that the Webb glass of this nature should produce a green glowing effect when exposed to a black light, because the inner white layer has uranium oxide in it's makeup.

I wish I could say all of that wonderful stuff about my own pieces of this glass, but I still need better evidence to convince myself of it, not just a lot of people copying what each other say until it only looks like factual information from being repeated so many times by so many.

Hope someone has some convincing documentation on it, for your piece and my glass too. --- Mike

[krsilber]

Burmese is never cased, but peachblow-type glass sometimes was.  And Christine's right, Burmese is always UV reactive because it contains uranium.

(I believe in the link Christine provided, the Webb piece there is not really peachblow.  The site has other suspect identifications: their Wheeling peachblow shows two salt and pepper sets, only one of which is possibly correct.)

According to Revi's Nineteenth Century Glass, Mt. Washington filed papers for the trade names "Peach Blow" and "Peach Skin," so other companies used different appellations.  Seems to me acceptable that for simplicity's sake people use "peachblow" for similar struck pieces, as long as they don't extend it to all pink shaded ware. 

Webb's Peach Glass and Stevens and Williams's Peach Bloom shaded from yellow at the bottom to red at the top, so that counts them out.  Hobbs, Brockunier's Coral is similar.  Mt. Washington's Peach Blow is light greyish blue at the bottom.  Gunderson Pairpoint's Peach Blow is white or pink at the bottom, but seems like it's a different tone of pink from this (see these examples: http://www.brooksideartglass.com/indexlsa2.html)

I think it's likely given the colors that this isn't a struck piece, just a shaded one.

EDIT:  here's more info about peachblow:  http://www.collectics.com/education_peachblow.html

[butchiedog]

Just in case nobody has ever noticed it; 

some of Fenton's Burmese glass items are actually Burmese glass cased over a layer of custard colored glass. On some pieces the restruck areas are pink on the outside of the item only. As far as I know all old Burmese glass turned pink inside and out on the restruck areas. --- Mike

[krsilber]

Huh, I guess I was told wrong then about Burmese never being cased.  I don't know much about Fenton.  I just looked at a few dozen Fenton Burmese pieces on the 'net and none were cased.  Mike, is it possible you were seeing pink only on the outside because that's where it got hot enough to change color?  Some struck objects seem to be different colors on the inside and outside even when not cased.

[butchiedog]

Hello again,

I didn't mean to imply that this is a consistent thing, plus one needs to see the right pieces and of course one needs to know to even look for it, since it's not advertized as an "Overlay" like a lot of Fenton's other overlay\cased glass is.

Nobody told me about it, I just have a natural habit\tendency to look very closely at things and inspect the heck out of them, which is the only reason I noticed it.

Here is a vase I dug out of a bin, sorry about the photo quality, it's not my best talent.

http://i29.tinypic.com/29f8sia.jpg

In person I can actually see where one color layer ends and another begins, it doesn't blend\fade from one color to another. I can even catch my fingernail on a slight ridge between the two colors. This may only be the case for items that have the optic? design on the body of the item, since that's where I have seen it, on 6 pieces I have like this. The rest of my plain body pieces look like I expect normal Burmese glass to look, pink inside and out on the areas where it was restruck.

I might be missing something, but I don't see how glass less than an eighth inch thick  can be reheated and only one side of it heat up. Hope this helps to explain what I mean. --- Mike