Collecting Old Glass, English and Irish

XIX. GENERAL HINTS AND WARNINGS

Jacobite, Williamite, and Hanover or Trafalgar glasses being in great demand, ingenious persons take a real old wine glass, goblet, or rummer, that is plain and innocent at the time, and engrave it with Jacobite emblems or “Bonny Prince Charlie’s” head, or William of Orange on horseback, or “Trafalgar,” or “Nile.” As a rule the evident newness, roughness, and lack of “wear” of such added engraving condemn it, to the eye and to the finger; but very ingenious persons use chemicals, or mud, or attrition, in order to disguise the whitish-grey tint of newly engraved glass; if part of the engraving be “buffed” up—that is, polished till it is bright, transparent, and not the tint of ground glass (see centre of rose, page 70), detection becomes more difficult.

THE COLLECTOR’S INSTINCT

But after a while the “instinct” of a collector comes into play to protect him against these and other frauds. He cannot exactly reason out and state why an offered piece is “wrong,” but he feels that it is not right; which means that the “altogether” of the glass suggests to his subconscious mind something which, though not expressed, is a good reason for not buying the glass. But this “instinct” only comes after much practice in collecting, and repeated turning of pages for reference, in a book such as this; a collector’s books should not be read once and then laid aside; they should be referred to on every occasion, even after the “instinct” has begun to stir.

LIKELIHOOD AND IMPROBABILITY

Extraordinary chances come to the “picking-up” collector, I know, but he does well to keep in mind the probability or the unlikelihood of his “find” being real. It is unlikely that he should more than once happen upon a Jacobite glass, for example; and again, if he sees a fine “Trafalgar” glass exhibited in a small jeweller’s shop, with no other glass at all or any other “curios,” the probability is that some fraudulent person has planted that false glass there, in what is a likely place to attract and deceive a collector who “picks up.”

THE ABSOLUTE FRAUDS

Old English and Irish glass has a soft and mellow tone, both of look and sound; it has a calm, respectable, honest appearance, as of quality and honesty combined. Fitness for its purpose, good workmanship, some quaintness perhaps, but not much fantasy, are visible in it; if it is decorated, the decoration has been done well, but without lavish artistic imagination.

Now about the forgeries of it there is something hard and fast, an appearance too shiny and shining, and a rigidity of copying. Seldom are even two old glasses belonging to a set quite alike, but the forgeries are exact replicas by the hundred. See one, you see them all; but see one real old glass, you notice differences in it from all others. Forged glass, recently made, is “buffed” or polished on the wheel all over its surface; old glass was never buffed, and its polish rather resembles that of old furniture due to “elbow grease”—the polish comes of long washing, wiping, and drying.

I have already described the differences of tint. Forged glasses are clumsy imitations in this, for the forgers do not try to give the old dark tints—they use lead that is not so impure as the old lead was, and therefore produces less visible oxide.

The cutting of old glass, done by hand, produced and displays irregularities; so does modern cutting. But the old irregularities were due to a lack of machine-like precision, and were natural, accidental irregularities: the modern irregularities are (so to speak) mechanical, and obviously due to haste and cheapness of production. Labour and time were no great matters with the old workmen; the counterfeit work is obviously done with the minimum of labour and time.

Modern English-made glass has often a good ring when flicked; foreign-made frauds on the old have not, or have it seldom.

THE “MODERN ANTIQUE”

Much of the glass sold in the smaller curio-shops as “antique” was not made to deceive: it is the offering of it in such places which intends fraud. Most English-made reproductions of old glass in shape and cutting were not intended by the manufacturer to delude a collector, but to attract the ordinary buyer for table use or decorative use; one who is not a collector but “likes something that looks old-fashioned,” as he says.

Pawnbrokers’ and jewellers’ shops are stocked with what is called in the trade “the modern antique”; other examples of this are the cheap, hasty, and obvious copies of miniatures of famous beauties set in new paste frames and sold for a few shillings. In pawnshops and ordinary glass-shop windows a collector sees spiral-stem wine glasses made for modern use and not intended to deceive; they are a kind of tawdrily ornamental hock glass, embodying some modern designer’s idea of what is beautiful; they correspond with no antique shape of bowl, the stems are very thin and fragile, the feet are as small as or smaller than the rim of the bowl, and the spirals are parti-coloured and “tight.” No collector need be taken in by such as these—they were not made to take him in, they are ordinary articles of modern manufacture and daily commerce.

So are the white glass bowls, tazzas, centre-pieces, vases, “specimen glasses,” etc., elaborately cut, perhaps engraved also, and meant for modern tables and mantelpieces. These are copies of the fine old ware simply because the old ware affords good models, and the information given in chapter ii of this book will enable a collector to recognize the modernity of these honest imitations, even when they are found (as they often are) in a shop supposed to purvey antiques.

OUT-OF-THE-WAY PIECES

I do not say that very unusual and out-of-the-way pieces of old glass should be avoided; as the collecting of glass increases, many rare old things will be brought out of cupboards and sold in shops. But I do say that, as a rule, a collector should feel suspicious of any piece not resembling those which are pictured in books like this, or those seen in museum collections. Thus a tall, bulky goblet engraved with a portrait of William Pitt or Wellington, and inscribed accordingly, if it is offered for 30s., say, is highly suspicious, to say the least of it; and the safer course is to refuse apparent bargains of the kind.

FAKED JACOBITE GLASSES, ETC.

This applies even more to the pseudo-Jacobite, Williamite, Nelson, and other famous glasses which are offered. They may be old glasses “engraved up,” in which case the only mode of detection is the quality, finish and tint of the engraving. They may be English-made modern glass, of the right ring and the old way of manufacture; in which case the test of tint in the glass itself may be added to the test of the engraving. In either case the engraving may too closely reproduce an original glass; it is seldom that two old glasses of this type exactly resemble each other in the position of the various emblems, portraits, and so on: for example, the word Fiat is hardly ever found in exactly the same place on two real old glasses. If the pseudo-Jacobite or other engraved glass fails to respond to the characteristics of high instep or domed foot, tint, ring, etc., or any of these, it should be rejected.

FAKED SPIRAL GLASSES

Fraudulent air-spiral or cotton-spiral-stemmed glasses, not engraved or inscribed, are the fraud most often offered to a collector: in addition to the other tests mentioned, the test of the skill and quality of the spiral itself can be used in this case. The counterfeits show spirals which are meagre, irregular, tight, or the wrong colour; they do not fill up the stem, or exactly swell out to fill up the knops; in the cotton-white there are defects resembling dropped threads in a piece of linen, or missed stitches in a piece of lace. I possess one excellently twisted air-spiral forgery, a simple cable, which might deceive if the plain glass around it forming the rest of the stem were not so thick and so distinct as to suggest that the spiral was made first and the plain glass placed around it afterwards; the old spirals, air, cotton-white or coloured, were twisted at the time of and in the actual making of the whole stem. Modern spiral stems are often writhen or ridged on the surface, too; which means that the twisting of the stem has been done with less than the old amount of skill. In short, the making of spiral stems is a lost art, not recovered even by the assiduous forgers, up to the present.

If a spiral revolves upwards from right to left—the right to the left of the person looking at it—reject it; this defect was a feature of the earlier forgeries, but the proper direction of the upward twist (from left to right) is now used in these fakes.

The old cut stems are more easily imitated: with these a test is the absence of all trace of a pontil-mark. In many old cut glasses the finger feels a distinct depression, usually circular, which shows where the old pontil-mark was cut away. In some forgeries, made by moulding, not by blowing, the pontil-mark is imitated, but so grossly that it ought not to deceive.

SHAM WINE COOLERS AND FINGER BOWLS

Counterfeit eared wine coolers and beautifully cut counterfeit finger bowls are on the curio market; the usual tests should detect these. Imitation Bristol blue, and violet glass is offered, but it is not the right blue, which passes from a purple in the thick, to a sea-blue in the thin, parts when held to the light; or not the right violet, in which the same varying of colour is evident. Dozens of fraudulent white and violet finger bowls, elaborately cut, are on the market; but it is the rarest thing to find more than five or six left of any set of old finger bowls.

OLD DUTCH GLASS

Glassware of the seventeenth and eighteenth century made in the Lowlands, whether at Liège or Amsterdam, is known over here as “old Dutch.” Collectors will do wisely to study this ware, whether for the purpose of rejecting or acquiring it. Most collectors of English and Irish glass reject it at once; they rightly say that when thin it is too light-weight, bubbly, flashy, flat and short of ring, and when thick too smeary of tint and too clumsy to be first class; and often the engraving is poor and ugly. Indeed, there is something unfinished and unworkmanlike about it, compared with the craftsmanship put into English and Irish old glass; just as there is about Dutch-made furniture of William and Mary and Queen Anne date, compared with English-made furniture of the Chippendale period and style. There is something unsatisfactory in the look, shape, and proportions; it seems to lack completeness and fitness.

In the stemmed glasses, however, the Dutch air spirals are excellently done—except where they join the foot of the glass, sometimes; and the cotton-white spirals are hardly inferior to the English except in the greyness of the colour. For this reason, and also because the number of collectors of old glass increases, Dutch wine glasses on spiral stems go up in price at London auctions nowadays, and a rose glass or other pretty, well-engraved piece of Flemish or Dutch origin may be worth acquiring: there are collectors here of the Holland ware already, and there will be more as English and Irish ware of the kind becomes more difficult to find and expensive to buy. A spirit bottle, decanter, goblet, or other piece of Dutch glass that is engraved with armorials or dates, or names or legends, is not to be disdained, therefore; nor is any unusual piece that is quaintly quirked, fluted, purfled, and bossed.

CHIPPED OR BROKEN PIECES

It is sometimes worth while cheaply to acquire a chipped or even a broken piece of old glass, if it is very rare in kind, form, or purpose. Chipped feet of wine glasses can be ground again, but it is hardly worth while; when the foot is almost all gone, a metal substitute can be made for it, but that is hardly worth while. I know of a Jacobite glass with a big piece out of the engraved portion cemented in again; the price of the glass is £40 all the same; but as a rule it is not worth while to acquire chipped or broken articles of old glass.

“TOUT PASSE, TOUT CASSE, TOUT LASSE”

The French proverb tells us that everything passes, everything breaks, everything wearies, at last. But the collector knows better than that; he prevents old works of art and craft from passing altogether; he keeps them safe from breaking, and he never wearies of adding to them or studying them; as I hope this book may enable many a collector to do.