Painted and Gilt Glass
Before passing on to the many-sided subject of engraved and cut glass, a word must be said of certain applications to glass of painting and gilding which were much in favour in Germany in the seventeenth century. I have here to deal with a miscellaneous class of objects; indeed the chief connecting-link between them is the fact that the decoration is in no case fixed by fire.
Single sheets of glass may be simply painted at the back, and ‘fixed’ by means of a transparent varnish. Such plates, painted with Biblical or allegorical subjects, may be seen let into the panels of the elaborately carved and inlaid cabinets of the time. It cannot be said that the effect of this pausch glas Malerei, as it is sometimes called in Germany, is very satisfactory. It is indeed merely a debased variety of what used to be known in France as verre églomisé; the term fixé peint has also been used for work of this kind.
The gilding that was so plentifully applied to the German engraved glass of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was fixed by a ‘cold’ process, by simply attaching the gold-leaf by means of a varnish. For the most part it is only when applied to the sunk part of an incavo decoration that this gilding has survived.
The gilding, however, has been more effectually preserved in the case of another cold process which came into vogue before the end of the seventeenth century, and rapidly spread from Bohemia, or perhaps rather from Silesia, to various parts of Germany. In the case of these zwischen gläser we are taken back to an old process, already known to the Alexandrian Greeks. The plan adopted in no way differs in principle from that made use of in the decoration of the beautiful bowls from Canosa, now in the British Museum (see p. [46]).[[204]] Very inferior to these in artistic merit are the little footless tumblers, with designs in gold, often hunting scenes, which seem to have been made on both sides of the Silesian-Bohemian frontier before the end of the seventeenth century. These are built up of two glasses, both somewhat tapering and both cut into an equal number of perpendicular sides, so that when the smaller of the two was inserted into the interior of the larger the glasses fitted exactly, and could not rotate one upon the other. The inner glass being somewhat the taller, we find the ring of junction, which is generally concealed by a band of gold, about half an inch or so below the top of the glass. The edges are so exactly bevelled that this line of junction is barely perceptible even to the touch. Before fitting the two glasses together, the inner one had been coated on the outside with gold-leaf, and the design carefully engraved on the gold with a steel point; while on the inside of the outer glass a coating of old linseed oil or of varnish had been smeared. I should add that a medallion of ruby glass, variously ornamented, is usually found at the bottom of these tumblers inserted between the two layers of glass, or sometimes replacing the base of the outer cylinder. These glasses will not stand warm liquids: an example in the British Museum is disfigured by some large flattened blisters, probably the result of heat.[[205]] Glasses built up in this manner may of course be decorated in other ways; the gold-leaf, for instance, may be replaced by silver foil. Kunckel, of ruby-glass fame, describes a method in which the inner glass is plainly gilt, while the outer one is painted on the inside in imitation of precious marbles (Ars Vitraria Experimentalis, 1679). I have seen examples of this manner of decoration in German museums.
CHAPTER XVII
THE GLASS OF GERMANY—continued
German Cut and Engraved Glass—The Ruby Glass of Kunckel—Milch Glass
I have still to describe the origin and development of a method of decorating the surface which forms, I may almost say, the last main division in the artistic history of glass. For when I come in subsequent chapters to treat of Dutch and English glass—and with this my task practically closes—it will be found that this glass falls almost entirely under the head, and is in a general way an outcome, of the engraved or cut glass of Germany.
Here at the beginning I am confronted with a difficulty of a class only too often met with when treating of the technique of the minor arts—the difficulty of finding in our language suitable words to express, without danger of misconception and confusion, the practical details of the matter in hand. I have now to deal with the methods by which the surface of glass may be cut, polished, scraped, or eaten away, so as to form an artistic design. This, I may say at once, can be effected by any one of the following methods:—
1. By scratching with a diamond. I can find no other word; the term ‘engraving’ is vague and ambiguous; to use the word ‘etching’ is still worse, for though the result resembles in a measure the etched line on copper, this expression should be reserved for the process by which the surface is eaten away (the German ätzen) by acid.
2. By removing the surface by means of a small revolving wheel, or more rarely, of a cutting-tool, with the aid of emery or other hard powdered stone. The term ‘engraving’ may well be used here, if it is understood in the sense in which we speak of an ‘engraved gem,’ for small hard stones have been cut in this way from ancient times.
3. When, however, by means of a large wheel, the surface is deeply cut away, we may better use the words ‘cutting’ or ‘carving.’ The grinding down of the surface and subsequent polishing, as in the case of glass cut into facets, would fall into this division. It is, however, often difficult to say which of these terms—engraving, cutting, or grinding—it is preferable to use; nor is the use of the German words ‘schleifen’ and ‘schneiden’ much more definite.
4. By exposing parts of the surface to the fumes of hydrofluoric acid, the only acid that will attack glass. This process may well be called etching.
We have already spoken of the use of the diamond by the Venetians for scratching lace-like designs upon the surface of their thin glass, so unsuitable for other forms of engraving. The diamond point was early used in a similar way in Germany. Mathesius, after speaking of the imitations of the vetro di trina, made in his day in Silesia, proceeds to say that it is also the practice to draw (reissen) ‘auf die schönen und glatten Venedischen gleser mit demand [diamond] allerley laubwerck und schöne züge.’
This decoration with the diamond point was carried to great perfection in Silesia. Herr von Czihak has reproduced in his work on the glass of that country (p. [122]) two tall cylinders of this ‘gerissene glas’ (so it is called in contemporary inventories), which cannot be later than the sixteenth century. So, again, much of the glass of cristallo type made at Hall in the Tyrol was thus decorated.
But this process of drawing designs with a diamond point on the surface of glass required the sure hand of an artist; there was no room for any ‘pentimenti’—moreover, the result was not effective.[[206]] Before long, in Germany at least, except here and there by amateurs, it came to be used merely as supplementary to the newly introduced processes of cutting, engraving, and polishing—that is to say, to the combination of methods concisely indicated by the Germans as schliff und schnitt. This was, indeed, a return to a very old treatment of the material much in favour in later Roman times. We have recognised in the so-called Hedwig glasses the last efforts of an art already extinct in the West and decadent in the East; but we have no link with which to connect these rude, deeply carved goblets with the engraved glass of the German renaissance. The Germans were, indeed, familiar with the processes employed in polishing the surfaces of hard stones, especially of their native agates (as in the Hunsrück district). This they effected in early days by rubbing on a board, the schleif-platte, and already by the middle of the fifteenth century by means of a grindstone (schleif-stein) turned by water-power. There is, however, no evidence to connect this industry with the new art of engraving glass, which arose, it would seem, full-fledged at Prague and at Nuremberg just before the commencement of the seventeenth century.[[207]]
There is, indeed, every reason to accept the origin of this art given by contemporary writers—that it was learned from the Italian carvers of rock crystal, who in the last years of the sixteenth century were working for the Emperor Rudolph II., that moody recluse and most unsatisfactory ruler, who was, however, an eager and industrious inquirer into all the new arts and sciences of the day. This essentially cinquecento art of carving in rock crystal had been before this time carried to great perfection in the north of Italy. The most famous master was Valerio Belli (1479-1546), called Vicentino, from his birthplace. The finest work of this school is to be found in the caskets built up with plates of rock-crystal delicately carved in shallow intaglio.[[208]] Other artists carved in the round bowls and vases in the form of shells or other shapes, suggested, in the first place, by the outline of the original mass of crystal. If these men were in any way indebted to Greek artists from Constantinople or elsewhere, it can only have been for the knowledge of the mechanical processes, for there is no trace of Byzantine influence in their art. To judge by surviving examples, it was in the main the work carved in the round that found favour at the court of Rudolph II. We hear especially of two craftsmen from Milan, Girolamo and Caspare Miseroni, who worked for that prince.
As what we know of the early history of cutting and engraving on glass in Germany is chiefly derived from Sandrart’s famous work on the lives of German artists, I will here translate, with considerable abbreviations in places, what he says on this subject (Teutsche Academie, Nürnberg, 1675, Part II. book iii. chap. xxiv.).—It was during the reign of the most worthy Emperor Rudolph II. that the art of cutting glass was rediscovered and made public by Caspar Lehmann, Cammer-Edelstein und Glas-Schneider to his majesty. The emperor rewarded him richly for his discovery, and in the year 1609, at Prague, granted him certain privileges in a diploma which has been preserved:—‘Let all men know that our privy-precious-stone and glass-cutter Caspar Lehmann has informed us, that now some years since, with great strivings, with busy reflection, and not trifling cost, he discovered the art and practice of glass-cutting. And let it be known that the same C. L. shall have full liberty to carry on his art and work free and without let; and that no one, whoever he be, shall, without his consent, practise or deal in such art or work. And we request all the Electors, Princes, etc. etc., of the Empire to punish any infraction of this privilege with a fine of twenty marks of gold of true alloy.’
Lehmann, indeed, continues Sandrart, well deserved these privileges. Both he and his comrade Zacharias Belzer (they were both friends of Hans von Achen and Paul von Vianen, and for the most part they were lodged at court in one apartment) executed such excellent and artistic works in crystal and glass (some of which are still preserved in the Imperial Schatzkammer and also in the palace of the Elector at Munich) that they command the admiration of all connoisseurs.[[209]]
George Schwanhart the elder, says Sandrart, was the son of Johann, a skilful cabinet-maker and armourer, who made, among other things, exceptionally beautiful inlaid work of mother-of-pearl. George, who in his youth had learned cabinet-making and other arts from his father, acquired from the above-mentioned Lehmann a thorough acquaintance with the new art of glass-cutting. So much was he loved by Lehmann on account of his ingenious parts that the latter, before his death, bequeathed to him his privileges and rights as well as other property.[[210]] Schwanhart, after this time, further cultivated the art and much advanced it by various inventions, especially by the new ‘smooth or polished cutting’ (hellen oder blancken schneiden). His industry and skill obtained for him the praise and love of emperor, kings, and princes, as well as of all those who cultivated the arts and sciences. The late Emperor (Ferdinand III., 1637-1658) continued these privileges to his sons, Henry and George the younger, and gave to both of them appointments at court.
Now although, continues Sandrart, these artists had brought to perfection the art of glass-cutting as far as it depended upon judgment and drawing, yet in consequence of the too powerful and clumsy machinery made use of by them, even they were unable to give grace and charm to their work. When we consider the big heavy wheels that they were fain to employ—turned by those still flourishing weeds, their loutish assistants—we may well marvel at the work they turned out. Since that time the discovery of more convenient and efficient tools has brought it about that nowadays the art of glass-cutting is no longer a strenuous task, but rather a pastime. So that with intelligence and industry all the charm and softness of nature, whether trees, landscapes, animals, or portraits, may be by this art expressed. And yet these glass-cutters of to-day, with all their advantages, might obtain from their patrons still greater praise, were they to devote themselves more to the practice of drawing and to travelling about instead of marrying early and, as a consequence, having to work in the kitchen.[[211]]
Henry Schwanhart—I am still dependent upon Sandrart—who with his brother George inherited his father’s privileges, has not only distinguished himself as a philosopher and a poet, but has carried the art of glass-cutting to greater perfection. He has succeeded in tracing on glass, landscapes and complete views of towns—the city of Nuremberg above all—in correct proportion and cunningly retiring perspective, as in a painted picture. Nay, with his subtle wit he has done what before was held to be an impossibility, he has discovered an acid (corrosiv) of such a nature that the hardest crystalline glass yields to it, and like metals and stones, suffers itself to be corroded and eaten into.[[212]] He has quite lately given a complete proof of his skill in this art by etching all kinds of ornamental designs and inscriptions with the greatest neatness and precision. He has engraved, too, the human figure both nude and draped, and has brought it, as well as all kinds of animals and flowers, into high relief (in erheben zehr hoch gebracht).[[213]]
So far Sandrart, who was a contemporary of the younger Schwanhart, and I think that this long extract will give the reader some idea of the high esteem in which the art of engraving on glass was held at that time, as well as of the relation of the glass-engravers to the workers in other branches of art. The works of the Schwanharts are now, I believe, only to be identified in the case of certain examples of engraved glass in the Museum at Hamburg. Here may be seen a roemer, signed ‘G. S. 1660.’ The delicately engraved landscape on this glass, where the work of the diamond and that of the finest wheel are skilfully combined, would point to this being probably the work of the younger of the two Georges.
That even before the end of the sixteenth century there were engravers of glass in other parts of Germany, above all in Silesia, is very probable, but there can be no doubt that it was the connection of Lehmann and of the Schwanharts with the Imperial Court that first brought this style of decoration into favour with people in high station. In fact, for some time this engraved glass was made for the most part to the order of wealthy patrons. Besides those named by Sandrart, the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz and the Bishops of Würzburg and Bamberg are mentioned as patrons of the new art, and large prices were given for fine specimens of engraving.[[214]] One immediate consequence of the new fashion was to cause a demand for an absolutely clear white glass, and this led to such improvements in the manufacture that the glass of Silesia and Bohemia was soon recognised as the best in Europe.
ENGRAVED BEAKER. THE COVER WITH ENAMELLED METAL KNOB
GERMAN, EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
From other sources we hear that George Schwanhart the elder had three daughters, Sophia, Maria, and Suzanna, who devoted themselves to the engraving on glass of flowers and ornaments, and especially of those examples of calligraphy then so much in fashion. Sandrart, most ungallantly, fails to mention these ladies, who were his contemporaries.
Many other names of engravers on glass have been handed down to us,[[215]] but I will only mention Hermann Schwinger (1640-83), who was also a wood-carver and engraver on copper. We have in the British Museum (Slade, No. 883) a tall cup of thin white glass elaborately engraved with a Bacchic subject. Below, scratched by the diamond in small characters, may be read ‘Herman Schwinger, cristall schnider zu Nürnberg.’
There has been much discussion as to the nature of the improvements effected by the Schwanharts in the glass-cutting machinery. But before the end of the seventeenth century the arrangement of the wheels and the division of labour were probably on the whole established much in the manner that we find in local works in Bohemia at the present day. In a general way we may say that there has always been a distinction between the mechanical processes of grinding and polishing and the more delicate and artistic work of the engraver. In the latter case the work is done by pressing the glass against the edge of a minute copper wheel. On the other hand, the glass is ground down on a wheel of iron from three to eighteen inches in diameter, it is smoothed upon a stone wheel and finally polished upon one of wood, with the assistance in each case of suitable abrading mediums, whether emery, quartz sand, tripoli, or putty-powder.
As early as the seventeenth century these glas-schleifer were divided into several more or less independent groups. The eckigräber did the coarser work. It fell to them, in the first place, to remove all irregularities on the surface of the glass—for example, the rough projections left on the foot where the pontil had been attached—and more especially to make the cross cuttings required to form the facets, which at a later time were so much in vogue. The kugler were another class of workmen, who prepared the shallow circular or oval pits which play so important a part in the decoration.
The work of the actual engraver belongs more to the domain of art. The cutting in this case is effected by a little wheel of copper from a quarter inch to an inch in diameter, revolving rapidly at the end of a horizontal spindle, moved by a treadle. These little copper wheels are of various forms, and not the least part of the skill of the artist lies in the selection of the form most suitable for the work in hand. The decision as to the depth of the engraved line, and again as to which part should be polished and which left dull depends also upon his judgment. His difficulties are increased by the fact that he is unable to follow the progress of the work in hand, for not only has he to press the glass against the under surface of the wheel, but the part of the surface on which he is working remains covered by the emery or other abrading material employed (Von Czihak, pp. 136-139). It will be noticed that as a rule the incised parts are left unpolished and dull as they come from the wheel, and that the polishing is reserved for the little circular depressions, the kugeln, which then show out like jewels cut en cabochon.
We are apt to associate this engraved glass with Bohemia, but to say nothing of the highly finished and artistic work done at Nuremberg and Regensburg, it is probable that in no other district has the engraving and cutting of glass become so much a distinct industry as in the Silesian valleys that descend from the highest peaks of the Riesengebirge towards the town of Hirschberg. As early as the commencement of the seventeenth century we come across an Italian engraver on rock crystal in the service of the Freiherr von Schaffgotsch at Schloss Kynast, and at the same spot towards the end of the century, in the employ of the same family, we find Friedrich Winter, who has the credit of being the first in this district to apply water-power to the cutting and polishing of glass.
Soon after this time there are many complaints of the decadence and vulgarisation of the art. Thus in 1708 a writer in a commercial paper complains that the engraved glass, which formerly was only to be found on the table of people of quality, had now become ‘dirt-cheap,’ and that the art of the glass-cutter was brought into contempt by the hawkers of glasses who scoured nearly the whole of Europe with their engraved wares. Whole chestsful of these commoner glasses, the writer says, were sent to Spain, and found there a good market (quoted by Von Czihak, p. 129). Sandrart, it will be remembered, some years before this, had uttered a protest against the stimpler—the bungling, ignorant workmen—who were ruining the art, and now we find the same expression used in the diploma of the monopoly that was granted to the above-mentioned Winter in 1687 by Count Christoph Leopold of Silesia.
Thanks in a measure to the energy of Winter and to the support given to him, the little town of Warmbrunn soon became known all through Germany as well for its cut glass as for the warm springs to which it owed its name. As in other parts of Silesia, the glass industry, after the separation from Bohemia, suffered from the fiscal regulations of the new Prussian régime. Frederick the Great took an interest in the manufacture of glass, but this was shown rather in the encouragement and patronage accorded to the new glass-works that had been established nearer to his capital.
On the other side of the mountains also, at the end of the seventeenth century, some of the great Bohemian landholders were active in promoting the manufacture of glass on their estates. Of the Kinsky family and the town of Steinschönau (even to-day a great centre of the glass industry), we hear something in the curious account of his life left by a wandering glass-cutter, one Kreybich, who was born in that town in 1662. Kreybich, who had mastered the arts both of enamelling and engraving glass, carried his wares on his barrow all over Southern Germany. In his later journeys he pushed forward as far as Poland and Russia. As early as 1688 he is found in London, where, in spite of the competition of many new glass-furnaces (these, he confesses, turned out better metal than that which he had with him), he found a good demand for his engraved glass. When the wandering retailers of glass—we can hardly call them hawkers—returned to renew their supplies, then, says Kreybich, there was an eager demand from the glass-houses, and no less from the glass-cutters, the kugler, and the polishers. But not a few of these wandering glassmen carried, it would seem, their engraving-wheel and their tools with them, and engraved on the spot the arms or the initials of the purchasers of their glasses.
We may indeed regard the first half of the eighteenth century as the most flourishing period of the glass industry in Bohemia and Silesia. At the end of that time the Bohemian town of Haida—at the present day the centre of more than one branch of the glass manufacture—rose to importance, thanks to the fostering care of Count Kinsky. But the industrial and commercial element now came more and more to prevail. Enterprising manufacturers like Franz Weidlich of Steinschönau exported to Spain and Portugal, and others supplied the Eastern market as far as the Indies with glass summarily decorated with ‘little wreaths cut with a small copper wheel with the aid of emery.’ This Eastern trade passed through Vienna, and meeting with every encouragement from Maria Theresa and from Joseph II., soon undermined the time-honoured monopoly of the Venetians in the Levant and in Persia. With the Western market it was otherwise. The German glass had to reach the Peninsula by way of the Flemish ports, Antwerp and Ostend. What we have known as the Spanish Netherlands were now in Austrian hands, and the new government was eager to promote the local industries. The energetic firm of the Bonhommes (see p. [242]), long established at Liége and other neighbouring towns, competed successfully first with the German and then with the English glass-makers, just as formerly they had competed with the Italians, adopting in turn the methods of each.[[216]]
But in addition to cutting or engraving with a wheel and scratching with a diamond, there is a third method by which the surface of glass may be removed. This is by means of hydrofluoric acid, the only re-agent by which glass is rapidly attacked. The discovery of this acid is usually ascribed to Scheele, the Swedish chemist (born 1742), and a date as late as 1771 is given to the discovery. But there is no doubt that the special virtues of the fumes that are given off when fluor-spar is heated in sulphuric acid were known before this time.[[217]] We have seen how Sandrart, writing before 1675, mentions that his contemporary Henry Schwanhart engraved glass by means of a ‘corrosiv,’ and the statement is repeated with picturesque details by Doppelmayr. By covering part of the glass with a varnish and exposing the rest to these acid fumes, Schwanhart produced a smooth pattern on a dead ground. Certain calligraphic inscriptions on plates of glass, preserved in German museums,[[218]] were probably engraved in this way, but at the time the process did not come into general use. At a much later period hydrofluoric acid has been largely employed in England and elsewhere for engraving on glass. Still more recently this method has given way to the sand-blast. These are both, however, purely industrial processes that have little to do with art.
We have seen how close was the relation in early mediæval times between the quest of the alchemist and the art of the glass-maker—that part of the art above all that was concerned with the production of coloured pastes. So again at the end of the seventeenth century, when the search for the philosopher’s stone, the universal medicine and other such nostrums, had again come into vogue in Germany, the glass-maker’s craft is once more found in close relation with these ambiguous researches. This intimate connection is well illustrated in the history of Johann Kunckel, a man whose career in more than one aspect reminds us of that of Böttger, the discoverer of the secret of making porcelain. Böttger may indeed be regarded as Kunckel’s successor at Meissen and Dresden, for both for a time held official positions as alchemist or arcanist at the Saxon court.[[219]] Kunckel was born in 1638 (or perhaps somewhat sooner) in the duchy of Schleswig. At an early age we find him in the service of the Saxon Elector engaged in the search for the philosopher’s stone. He lectured, too, on chemistry at Wittenberg before a numerous audience. After the year 1677 he entered the service of Frederick William, the Grosse Churfürst. It was at Berlin about this time that his researches upon the transformation of matter led him to make inquiries into the colouring of glass, above all into the mysterious process by which glass could be stained of a crimson or purple tint by means of gold. That such a colour could be thus obtained had long been a tradition among the alchemists. In the old books the secret was dangled before the eyes of the student without being fully explained. The Saracens were probably acquainted with it; Agricola mentions the ritzle, the ‘aurum quo tingitur vitrum rubro colore,’ and Neri refers to the red tint derived from gold.[[220]]
Not a little of the mystery that so long surrounded this ruby colour had its origin, no doubt, in the following facts:—1. The full tint is only to be got when an extremely minute quantity of gold is present. 2. The colour is not developed until the glass is reheated; on first cooling the metal is nearly colourless. It is scarcely necessary to point out how both these properties of the gold pigment must have appealed to the imagination of the alchemists, and have furnished them with arguments in favour of their transformation theories. Here, then, we have one explanation of the interest taken by these early inquirers in the processes of the glass-maker.
In 1679 Kunckel published his Ars Vitraria Experimentalis, a work which is indeed merely a retranslation into German of Merret’s edition of Neri (see p. [219]), with supplementary notes.[[221]] Not that Kunckel here fully discloses the secret of his famous ruby glass—he draws back at the last moment. Orschall, however, his rival, a man of whom we are told that ‘he took to polygamy and other irregularities, and died in a monastery in Poland,’ in his famous tractate Sol sine Veste, first printed in 1684, is somewhat more explicit. A propos of his experiments with certain ‘handsome vases in the style of porcelain,’ he tells us that the milkiness of the glass with which the Oriental porcelain was imitated was only developed on reheating, and the same, he mentions, is the case with the ruby colour of the glass containing gold.[[222]]
Kunckel was settled by the Great Elector on the Pfauen-Insel, near Potsdam, and it was in the glass-houses already erected on the island that, surrounded with the greatest secrecy, he first made his famous ruby glass. After a time, however, constrained by what he calls ‘die lüderliche Verkrämerung des Rubin-Flusses,’ otherwise by lack of gold, he passed over to the service of the Swedish king. He died at Stockholm as Baron Löwenstjern in 1702.
Kunckel’s name has become attached to certain large ewers and beakers of ruby glass. He made, too, glass of a deep emerald tint, but specimens of this are rare. Some of his glasses—and these are perhaps the oldest—are carved in high relief; others are blown with great technical skill. Large sums were given at the time for examples of his work. The vases of blown glass took on classical forms, and were set in scroll mountings of silver gilt. But these mounted pieces are for the most part of later date than Kunckel’s time, for glass of this kind was made at Zechlin and other places near Berlin up to the middle of the eighteenth century and perhaps later. A tankard of ruby glass in the British Museum (Slade, No. 869) bears the cipher of Frederick I. (1701-1713); in the same collection is another fine example (Slade, No. 868), a graceful ewer, set in a rococo silver-gilt mounting.[[223]] Among other specimens of this ruby glass in Lord Rothschild’s collection is a tumbler-shaped beaker, ‘frosted’ on the outside.
As in the case of the porcelain made at a later time in Berlin, the Prussian glass as a whole is distinguished by its technical excellence and, compared at least to the bulk of the contemporary work, by a certain severity of form and decoration.
Much opaque white glass was made in Germany, as in other countries, in the first years of the eighteenth century. By this means it was hoped to find an equivalent for the Oriental porcelain, which had not yet been successfully imitated. At South Kensington may be seen a covered beaker of this milch-glas elaborately painted with a baroque design; more often, however, the decoration on such ware is in a pseudo-Chinese style. Von Czihak has extracted from the contemporary work of a certain Kundmann, a learned doctor and dilettante, a recipe for making this glass with human bones; this formula, the author states, he obtained from Kunckel (Rariora Naturæ et Artis. Breslau, 1737). Kundmann claims for this glass, prepared from bones found in heathen burial-urns, that it surpassed in whiteness the best porcelain. On one of his glasses preserved in the museum at Breslau, there is a quaint Latin inscription. You are asked to offer a libation to those poor heathens for whom, after suffering both on the field of battle and in the furnace of the glass-maker, the pains of hell are reserved. Kundmann had too, in his cabinet, some little glasses on which were engraved the tobacco-plant and other designs relating to smoking. These, he declared, were prepared solely from sand and tobacco ash (Schlesische Gläser, p. 62).
There is one important branch of the Bohemian-Silesian glass industry, of which before ending a word must be said. This is the manufacture of beads and other kinds of verroterie, as well as of glass pastes for artificial jewellery.
Paternoster Kügelchen were probably made from an early date: the art may have been learned from wandering Venetians. In Bohemia, Betel-Hütten (‘bead furnaces’) are mentioned early in the seventeenth century. At Winterberg, of eight glass-furnaces four are so described. Here we have the very word (Betel, from Bete, a prayer) from which we have formed our term ‘bead.’ But nothing quite equivalent to this last convenient word ever came into use in Germany. From the word Paternoster-Kugel, when at a later time the demand came rather for beads for personal ornament or for export, the Germans passed to the ambiguous expression Perlen or Glas-Perlen.
The manufacture of the more elaborate forms of beads by means of the blow-pipe—the suppialume process of the Venetians—spread slowly in the north. Doppelmayr (op. cit., p. 226) states that the use of ‘a little copper pipe fixed over a burning lamp’ for making small objects of glass was first taught at Nuremberg by one Abraham Fino, who came from Amsterdam in 1630. The Dutch, he says, had been taught the art by a Venetian. Kunckel, on the Pfauen-Insel, was occupied in making beads for exportation to West Africa by the newly founded Brandenburg African Company. In the early years of the eighteenth century the competition with Venice was keen, but in this branch the Italians seem to have held their own. Not so, however, in the kindred industry, the manufacture of glass pastes for artificial jewellery. Before the middle of the century, certain districts in Northern Bohemia obtained almost a monopoly in this art. These ‘Bohemian stones’ were made first at Turnau, by the Fischer brothers. This was early in the century; by 1786 there were, it is said, 443 master-workmen in the district thus employed. After that time the first place was held by the rival town of Steinschönau, to this day the centre of the industry (Lobmeyr, Die Glas Industrie, 1874, p. 135).
CHAPTER XVIII
DUTCH GLASS OF THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
In Holland the War of Independence does not seem to have interfered with the work of the glass furnaces already established in several of the towns by Altarists or Venetians. M. Schuermans, who has devoted a section of one of his letters to Holland (op. cit., vol. xxix. pp. 147-66), finds traces of the Italians at Bois-le-Duc, Middelburg, Haarlem, and Amsterdam. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century there were already at Amsterdam glass-houses managed by Dutchmen. M. Henri Havard has found in the registers of the States-General mention of two Dutch glass-makers who obtained at this time a privilege for fifteen years to make ‘glasses for Rhine wine in the shape of roemers as well as beer glasses’ by certain new processes (Oud Holland, i. 182). For a time there was an active rivalry between the glass-makers of Amsterdam and Antwerp: at a later period the enterprising Liége family of the Bonhommes obtained a footing in several Dutch towns. But, as I have already said, the ‘green glass’ of the Rhine (not always necessarily green or even coloured) was from early times in favour in Holland, if indeed we are not to regard it as indigenous in the country. At a later period there is no doubt that most of the finer specimens were made there. It is glasses of this class, roemers in the first place, but also tall ‘flutes,’ that we see so often in the works of the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. Those of a Venetian type, on the other hand, though by no means absent, are much rarer than in the contemporary paintings of the Flemish school.
The Dutch seem above all to have esteemed the ruimer or roemer; on glasses of this shape the finest engraving and diamond-scratching were expended, and it was these glasses that they selected to mount on tall silver stands of elaborate workmanship. There are the bekerschroeven (beaker-screws), which may at times be seen on the buffet in a seventeenth-century Dutch interior. There are several fine examples of these trophy-like arrangements in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam.
For us, seeing that we must confine ourselves to points of real artistic interest or historical significance, the glass made by the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is of importance mainly under these two aspects: 1. That here the art of engraving, or rather scratching, with the diamond was carried to greater perfection than in any other country. 2. That starting from the close of the seventeenth century, the forms and methods of construction of the Dutch drinking-glasses (apart from the roemer) first greatly influenced, and then in turn were influenced by, our English glasses.
As in Germany, where the Emperor Ferdinand III. learned the art, drawing with the diamond on glass was in Holland practised as an elegant accomplishment by people in good position, and above all by ladies. Indeed we are here brought into contact with a cultured literary set, a coterie of which the members held a higher social, and perhaps intellectual, position than we can allow to the majority of the great painters of the day whose names are better known to us. Typical frequenters of this circle were the three sisters, daughters of Roemer Vischer, who were immortalised in the songs of Huyghens, Cats, and Hooft (Don Henriques de Castro, ‘Een en ander over Glasgravure,’ Oud Holland, i. 286; see also Hartshorne, p. 48). A still more famous literary lady was Anna Maria van Schurman, who among so many other accomplishments had, as Cats has recorded, mastered the art ‘met een diamant op het glas gheestigh to schrijven.’[[224]] Several good examples of the work of these ladies, which took the form for the most part of mottoes engraved with scrolls and flourishes on the bowls of roemers, are preserved in the Rijks Museum: some of these have been admirably reproduced by Mr. Hartshorne in his work on English glasses.[[225]]
Another interesting class of diamond-scratched Dutch glass is well represented in the British Museum. Here we find portraits of contemporary celebrities, of members of the house of Orange in many cases, together with coats-of-arms, scratched on the bowls of wine-glasses—either conical glasses of Venetian forms or tall narrow ‘flutes.’ Sometimes, indeed, designs of this character are found on winged glasses of purely Venetian type. Mr. Nesbitt was of opinion that these were made in Venice (Slade Catalogue, No. 891), but we now know, thanks to M. Schuermans’ researches, that such glasses may well have been produced at this time in the north. The similarity in form of the bulbs or knops on the stems of all the glasses of this series should be noted: in no case is there any trace of cutting with the wheel on this part, still less of any facetting. On a thin funnel-shaped glass (Slade, No. 889) we have on one side the arms of England and Orange-Nassau impaled, on the other is a portrait of a lady in the costume of the middle of the seventeenth century, doubtless the ‘counterfeit’ of Mary, Princess of Orange, the daughter of Charles I. It is to her that we must refer the inscription in Gothic letters, ‘Het Welvaren Van De Princes.’ In these Dutch glasses scratched with the diamond may be found perhaps the earliest instances of glasses ‘that have been made to speak.’
BEAKER WITH THE FOUR SEASONS IN MEDALLIONS
DESIGN SCRATCHED WITH DIAMOND. DATED 1663. PROBABLY NETHERLANDISH
Of quite another nature were the elaborate compositions engraved for the most part with the wheel upon plates of glass. It was to work of this kind that Gerard Dou was brought up by his father—himself ‘a glass-worker and writer on glass,’ and subsequently master of the glass-makers’ guild at Leyden. The younger Dou was apprenticed to one Dolendo, who is described as ‘a right good plate-etcher,’ before he entered the studio of Rembrandt (Martin, Gerard Dou, pp. 28-29).
There came into fashion in Holland in the next century a method of engraving on glass, if engraving it can be called, of quite a different nature. This is the stipple or dotted method, the stip of the Dutch, by which a design of the utmost delicacy—a mere breath, as it were—is made to appear on the surface of the glass. When examined with a glass the decoration is seen to be built up of minute dots as in a stipple engraving,[[226]] differing from the latter, however, in this, that in the case of the work on the glass, the lights are given by the dots and the clear untouched ground represents the shadow.
One of the earliest masters, if not the inventor of this method, was Frans Greenwood, who appears indeed to have worked with the wheel also. Greenwood—his name would point to an English extraction—was born at Rotterdam in 1680, and the latest date found on his engraved work is 1743. There is in the British Museum a wine-glass with a Bacchic subject, a highly finished example of this pointillé process, signed ‘F. Greenwood ft.’ In the eighteenth century this stippling on glass was practised by painters of some note. Thus there are two glasses in the Rijks Museum (dated 1750 and 1751) both stippled with portrait heads, which bear the signature of Aart Schouman, a portrait-painter of repute at the time. But the greatest master of the art was Wolf, an eccentric genius who lived at the Hague. We know little of him except that he married in 1787, and died young in 1808. Glasses stippled with graceful designs by this master, somewhat in the manner of Bartolozzi, are perhaps less rare than those of Greenwood or Schouman. Some of his engravings are found upon goblets of flint glass with facetted stems, of English make, probably. On an example of his work in the British Museum a graceful female figure bears a scroll with the words, ‘Werken van het genootschap. K.W.D.A.V.’
The tradition of Wolf was carried on by Daniel Henriques de Castro, who died as late as 1862. The son of the latter artist, in an article on the subject in the first volume of Oud Holland, has collected some traditions bearing on the methods of execution of this now lost process. The author relates how he had come across an old man who had watched Wolf while at work on one of his glasses; according to his report, his only tools were an etching-needle and a small hammer. This is a matter of some importance, as both the late Mr. Nesbitt and Mr. Hartshorne appear to have taken it for granted that this delicate film-like engraving was produced, in part at least, by means of acid. But the two processes can hardly have been combined, and the effect is quite unlike that produced when the surface of glass is eaten away by hydrofluoric acid. It would, indeed, be quite impossible to produce such delicate work by any etching process of this latter kind.[[227]]
I shall have something to say of the Dutch wine-glasses of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when I come to speak of the English glasses that were in a measure founded on them. Suffice to mention that already, before the end of the seventeenth century, we find on these glasses the welted foot and the baluster stem moulded and uncut, enclosing one or more ‘tears’—forms that somewhat later passed over to England.
CHAPTER XIX
ENGLISH GLASS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
In an English work treating of glass, or rather of certain descriptions of glass, and that chiefly from the artistic point of view, what position in the book and what relative amount of space should be given to the glass of England?
The position is, indeed, readily defined, for our country has but slight claims to recognition as a producer of artistic glass until the commencement of the eighteenth century—indeed we may perhaps say until that century was well advanced. The consideration, then, of the glass of this country must be kept back until that of all the other European States—Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands—that have at one time or another produced glass of artistic importance has been dealt with.
As to the relative importance of our English glass and the amount of space to be allotted to it, this is a question difficult to answer. For a moment, no doubt, towards the end of the eighteenth century, it held the premier place in Europe, on the ground, above all, of the excellence of the material. Advantage was taken of certain exceptional qualities in the English flint or lead glass to produce a deeply cut, facetted ware, solid and brilliant, something undoubtedly sui generis and suitable to its place on the sideboard, or on the well-polished mahogany table when the cloth was removed. The flashing fire of the lights cast back from the skilfully arranged facets of the decanters and glasses, combined with the softer reflections from the silver plate to give an undeniable charm and an individual stamp to these late Georgian dinner-tables. This play of lights has appealed to, and has been not unsuccessfully reproduced by, more than one painter of the present day. But this facetted ware, the one glory of our English glass, came late into vogue, at a time when the prevailing fashions allowed little room for any freedom of treatment, so that it is only rarely that we can find any merit in the forms and decorations of individual examples.
It is, however, to a somewhat earlier period that the modern enthusiast turns. His interest lies in the air-twisted stems, the folded feet, and the bell-shaped bowls of the drinking-glasses of the eighteenth century. Now these, though made of flint glass, belong mostly to a time before full advantage had been taken of the dispersive power of that material upon the rays of light. Here the question may well be asked—putting aside all matter of historical or sentimental interest—what can we say of these endless rows of glasses, classified and sub-classified on the ground of variety of stem or bowl, as objects of art? But this is a point upon which I should prefer not to deliver a definite judgment; I have said enough to indicate my personal standpoint. I can only refer the reader to the copiously illustrated work of Mr. Hartshorne on English glass, of which the larger part is occupied with this branch of the subject.[[228]]
It may be said that the history of English glass divides itself into two periods. For the first we have abundant documentary evidence—patents for new processes and petitions for or against these patents, to say nothing of notices in contemporary journals and memoirs—but against this an almost total absence of examples of the glass actually made. This period extends from the early days of Elizabeth almost to the end of the seventeenth century. In the second period, on the other hand—and this includes nearly the whole of the eighteenth century—the documentary evidence almost completely fails us; but in its place a fairly rich material harvest is available—the wine-glass, above all, so dear to the collector, now asserts itself.
When at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, or even a little earlier, a few rays of light begin to be thrown upon the glass made in England, we find the industry centred in a district on the borders of Surrey and Sussex: we are here at the western extremity of the great forest of the Weald, that was a little later to become for a time the home of an important iron industry. Here the raw materials and the fuel were at hand. Fuel from the oaks and beeches, and from trees of smaller growth; the silica from the ‘Hastings sands,’ selected from spots where the beds were tolerably free from iron; and finally the alkali, for the most part from the ashes of the bracken that then as now grew so abundantly in the glades of the woods. For this old English glass, like that of France, was essentially a verre à fougère,[[229]] made in districts remote from towns. At a somewhat later time the glass-workers were indeed forbidden to set up their furnaces within twenty-two miles of London, seven miles of Guildford, or within four miles ‘of the foot of the hills called the Sussex downs.’
The little village of Chiddingfold, just within the boundary of Surrey, may perhaps lay claim to be the original ‘metropolis of English glass,’ and a line measured from Hindhead to Petworth passes close to the various places—Loxwood, Kirdford, Fernfold, Wisboro’ Green—where we know that furnaces were already established early in the sixteenth century. I have already referred to this district when speaking of the English glass of mediæval times (see p. [139]). Fragments of green glass have been found on the site of a glass-house at Chiddingfold. In the Museum at Lewes are two bulbous flasks with long necks of this green Weald-glass. There was another centre of the glass industry in East Sussex, in the country to the north of Hastings. In a mediæval document concerning Beckley, in this district, the name Glassye Borough occurs. At these woodland glass-houses, for many generations, the wandering pedlars, the ‘glass-men,’ had been wont to renew the stock of ‘vrynells, bottles, bowles, cuppis to drinck and such lyke,’ that they hawked along the country-side. You may send, says Thomas Charnock in his Breviary of Philosophy (1557), to Chiddingfold, to the ‘glassemaker,’
‘And desire him in most humble wise
To blow thee a glass after thy devise.’
That is to say, that the glass-blower, as we have seen in other cases, worked from the patterns provided by his customers.
Camden says of the Sussex glass that in his time it was only used ‘of the common sort.’ Possibly the Sussex glass-blowers made quarrels and bull’s-eyes for windows also;[[230]] this, however, was an industry that centred rather in London, especially in Southwark. Now it was above all the demand for larger and better made panes for use in the new mansions with spacious windows—the ‘glass houses’ of the proverb about throwing stones—that were now springing up on every side, that gave the most powerful impulse to the introduction of the newer methods of working glass that had already taken root in France and in the Low Countries. It must be remembered that in the preparation of the stained glass for church windows large pieces were not required. Considerable artistic skill in this branch would be quite compatible with a very primitive method of blowing and ‘flashing’ the glass. At this time the new industry—the making of large sheets of broad-glass, that is to say—was centred in Lorraine, in the country stretching from the Vosges to the Ardennes; in a lesser degree in Normandy. It is uncertain in what the superiority of the ‘verre en tables quarrées’ made by the Lorrainers consisted; there is no positive proof that they had as yet adopted the German cylinder process (see pp. [129] and [234 note]), though this is in every way probable.
The French glass-workers who came to England belonged, for the most part, to the old noble families. We find in our English documents some of the very names—Hennezel, for instance—that occur in the famous Charte des verriers granted by John of Calabria, son of King René, in the year 1448 (see p. [230]).[[231]] When these foreigners are mentioned in our English documents they are invariably described as gentlemen or esquires.
We must remember that in the sixteenth century Antwerp held a commercial position something like that taken later by Amsterdam and London: the town was, above all, the centre of the glass trade. It is not surprising then to find that it was through the medium of an Antwerp merchant, one Jean Carré, that the French glass-makers were now introduced into England.[[232]] Carré, in association with a certain Briot, brought over both Normans and Lorrainers, and the quarrels and disputes that soon broke out appear to have had their origin in the fact that the men to whom the first patents were granted were not practical workers themselves, and that they were therefore dependent on others.[[233]] In any case, before the year 1570, gentlemen of Lorraine bearing the well-known names of Hennezel, Du Thisac, and Le Houx, as well, probably, as representatives of the Le Vaillant and other Norman families, were making glass in more than one spot in the Weald as well as in London.
But these proud, hot-headed foreigners do not seem to have been popular in Sussex. There were frequent petitions against the destruction of the woods to supply the fuel for their glass-houses, and we hear of an attempt made to rob the ‘outlandish men’ that made glass near Petworth and to burn their houses. Before 1576, then, the Lorrainers were already in search of forests where they could work without hindrance; they began that long peregrination that took them by way of the Hampshire woods to the Forest of Dean, and finally to Stourbridge and Newcastle.[[234]]
Some remains of a glass-house at Buckholt Wood, on the line of the old Roman road between Salisbury and Winchester, had long attracted the attention of antiquaries before a satisfactory explanation of their origin could be found. Large quantities of broken window-glass, as well as fragments of glass of many other kinds, including some of distinctly Venetian type, had at times been dug up. These remains, doubtless, represent a store of ‘cullet’ or old broken glass destined to be remelted, and therefore not necessarily all of it made on the spot. Fragments, too, of the glass-pots were found, of a greyish-white clay not of local origin. It is only quite recently that with these discoveries have been associated certain entries in the registries of the Walloon Church at Southampton (these were published a few years ago by the Huguenot Society). Among those admitted to the Lord’s Supper, in the years 1576 to 1579, we find the names of members of the Du Thisac, Hennezel, and Le Houx families, all Lorrainers, as well as that of Pierre Vaillant, a Norman. These communicants are described in the registry as ‘Ouvriers de verre a la verriere de boute haut’ (elsewhere spelt Bocquehaut), a fairly good French rendering of the word Buckholt. It is not every day that one comes across so neat and conclusive an instance of documentary research supplementing and completing the work of the ‘men of the spade.’
But here again, in spite of the attraction of the not far distant Walloon Church, the Lorrainers made but a short stay. In 1599 one ‘Abraham Tysack, son of a frenchman at the glasse-house,’ was baptized at Newent, in the Forest of Dean, where, at any rate, there can have been no deficiency of fuel. But the wanderers made apparently no long stay in the district, for we find that some at least of the number after a few years settled at Stourbridge, in Worcestershire. The famous clay of this district, still unsurpassed as a material for the glass-pots, was, it would seem, already worked along with the beds of coal which this clay underlies. Here, at King’s Swinford, in 1612, the name of Tyzack occurs in local records, and a little later, at Old Swinford, those of Henzey and Tittery. In this neighbourhood some members of these families at length settled down, maintaining close relations with certain of their relatives who pushed on as far as Newcastle-on-Tyne. At this last town, in 1617, a Henzey was fain to enter the service of Sir Robert Mansell, who was already bringing the principal glass-workers of England within the net of his monopoly.
I have dwelt on the wanderings of these Lorrainers, who were above all makers of window-glass, as to them rather than to the Venetians is due, I think, the definite establishment of a glass industry in England. For it must be borne in mind that the principal stimulus came from the demand for better and larger panes for the windows of the new renaissance houses,—somewhat later, perhaps, for the windows of ‘glass-coaches’ also.
Already early in the sixteenth century not a few examples of Venetian and, perhaps, even of Oriental glass, may have found their way into the houses of the wealthy. But we must regard as quite exceptional—the result, probably, of some passing whim of the king—the collection of 371 pieces of glass that were in 1542 in the possession of Henry VIII. These are described under the head of ‘Glasses and sundry other things of erthe’ in an inventory of certain valuable effects in the Palace at Westminster (Archæological Journal, vol. xviii., 1861). Among them there is mention of flagons, basins, ewers, standing-cups, cruses, layers, spice-plates, and even forks and spoons of glass. Many of these pieces are described as ‘jasper-colour’—these were probably of a kind of schmelz—and there is frequent reference in the list to ‘blue glass’ and ‘glass of many colours.’ A ‘layer’ with the initials ‘H and A engraven on the cover,’ as well as a cup with ‘Quene Annes sipher engraven on it,’ had doubtless belonged to Anne Boleyn. The following items are of some interest:—
‘One thicke glasse of christall with a case of lether lined with crymson vellat.’
‘Three aulter Candlestickes of glasse.’
‘Oone Holly-water stocke of glasse with a bayle.’
‘Twelve bottles of glasse with oone cover to them all wrought with diaper work white.’ By this last expression are we to understand some kind of vetro di trina?
Finally, ‘One rounde Loking Glass sett in a frame of wood, vj cornered, painted under glass with the armes of Ingland, Spayne, and Castile’ carries us back to the days when Catherine of Aragon was queen. Of this method of decorating the frames of mirrors with inlay of glass painted on the inner surface I have already spoken. I would again refer the reader to the mirror in the Arnolfini Van Eyck at the National Gallery.[[235]]
The earliest notice that we have of Venetian glass-workers in England carries us back to the year 1550, and it takes a form that is characteristic of the times. This is a petition to the Council of Ten, that has been found among the Venetian state papers. It is signed by no less than eight Muranese glass-workers, imprisoned in the Tower of London: they declare that they are threatened with the gibbet if they fail to work out their contract. These poor men were indeed between the devil and the deep sea; for did they delay their return to their homes they were liable, by a newly issued edict, to a long term in the Venetian galleys. It was only by the personal intervention of the young king that some arrangement was finally made that allowed of these Muranese glass-workers returning unmolested after working off part of their contract. One of these men indeed elected to remain behind, but he before long made his way to the Low Countries, and this first influx of Venetian workmen seems to have led to little as far as English glass was concerned.
Cornelius de Lannoy, from whom Cecil hoped so much, was perhaps as much an alchemist and a universal schemer as a worker in glass. He was set to work at Somerset House in 1564, but with little result, it would seem. He attributed his failure to the clumsiness of the English workmen and to the want of a suitable clay for his glass-pots.
It is to Jacopo Verzelini, a man evidently of some energy and resource, that we must give the credit of first successfully making the Venetian cristallo in England. When in 1575 he obtained a patent ‘for the makinge of all manner of counterfayt Venyse drinkinge glasses’ (but not, it would appear, of glass for windows), he was already established in London. Stow, writing a little later, says: ‘The first making of Venise glasses in England began at the Crotchet Friars, about the beginning of the reign of Q. Elizabeth, by one Jacob Vessaline an Italian.’ The Friars Hall, he tells us, ‘was made a glasse-house, wherein was made glasse of divers sorts to drincken.’ It was in this same hall probably that the unhappy craftsmen of Edward VI.’s time had been set to work. Verzelini, like other glass-workers of the period, reached England, it appears, by way of Antwerp. At any rate he was married to a lady of that town, of good family, who bore him twelve children. This we know from the monumental brass to his memory that may still be seen in the little church of Down in Kent, where in the year 1606 he was buried.
We see, then, that before the death of Elizabeth the making of both hollow ware and window-glass by the new methods was firmly established in London and in the provinces. Great complaints had already arisen of ‘the making of glass by strangers and outlandish men,’ and we hear of ‘the timber and woods spoiled by the glass-houses.’[[236]] The same difficulty arose as in France. It was argued that the foreigner should be required to take native apprentices. But there is evidence that as late as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the making of the better kinds of glass, the ‘Christalline Morana Glass,’ was still in the hands of Italians. This we have seen was for long the case in France as well. But we in England were in a measure dependent upon the foreigner for our window-glass also, this time upon the Lorrainer.
Of glass made in England during Elizabeth’s reign I can point to a goblet now in the British Museum. It is dated 1586, and bears an inscription in capitals of somewhat Gothic character—IN : GOD : IS : AL : MI : TRUST. The glass is engraved with the diamond, and is decorated with stringings of white enamel.[[237]] The plain cylindrical glass tankard in the Gold Room is remarkable only for the silver-gilt mounting and for the arms of Cecil on the cover.[[238]]
We have seen that early in the seventeenth century the French gentilshommes de verre were firmly established at Stourbridge and at Newcastle. Now by this time the outcry against the destruction of our English forests, the source of the timber for the navy, was becoming general. It was directed against the iron-smelters in the first place, and then against the makers of glass, above all against foreigners. ‘It were the less evil,’ says a proclamation of 1615, ‘to reduce the times into the ancient manner of drinking in stone and of lattice windows than to suffer the loss of such a treasure.’ It was in the Stourbridge district that Bub Dudley[[239]] and others were occupied at this very time with the problem of smelting iron by means of pit-coal. With them was probably associated Thomas Percivall, to whom more than to any one else is to be given the credit of the first successful employment of coal in the glass-furnace.
Others were working on the same lines. To Sir William Slingsby and his associates a licence was issued in 1610, but this was a very general document, vaguely worded. More precise was the patent granted the next year to Sir Edward Zouche, Thomas Percivall, and others. It was under this patent that the process was perfected, probably at the glass-house at Lambeth, under the charge of Percivall. Only a few years later, in 1616, English coal was brought into use at the glass-works of St. Sever, near Rouen, very likely through the mediation of one of the Norman glass-workers settled in England.
There were many difficulties to be overcome before this pit-coal could be used with success. Greater care had to be taken in the selection of the materials for the pots—perhaps without the Stourbridge clay success would not have been attained—and it was found to be necessary to ‘close the pots,’ that is to say, to use a covered crucible so as to protect the glass from the smoky, sulphurous gases given off by the coal. The credit of the invention of these closed pots, with the mouth at the side facing the opening of the furnace, is also to be given to Percivall.
I dwell on these practical details for a special reason. In the first place, the use of coal and the consequent change in the form of the crucibles mark the beginning of English glass as a distinct genre. Again, this change is closely connected with a further and still more important step—the use of lead as an essential constituent in a new kind of ‘metal,’ the famous English flint-glass of later days. It is these two novelties that form our contribution to the technique of glass-making. Not that I can find any proof that lead-glass was made in England at so early a date. But on the one hand the use of a covered pot rendered it more difficult, at that time at least, thoroughly to melt the contents, and therefore favoured the use of a more fusible mixture; on the other, in the case of a glass containing lead, it is above all essential to protect the ‘metal’ from the fire.
The history of the progress of glass-making in England from the early days of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the Civil War in the next century, is chiefly concerned with the licences and patents granted to a succession of English and foreign ‘adventurers.’[[240]] No doubt there were many abuses in this system; but it is impossible to overlook the fact that the Cecils and the other advisers of the Queen were enabled by such means to encourage the foundation of many industries, and this chiefly by the help of foreigners. For at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign we had fallen sadly behind in the matter of the industrial arts. Not only France and Italy, but Germany too and the Netherlands, had much to teach us.
Already, however, before the death of the Queen and still more in the next reign, there arose, as I have said, a great popular outcry against the monopolists, and this feeling of indignation found an echo in more than one of James’s parliaments. It is the more strange, therefore, to find that it was during this reign that the whole glass industry of the country fell for the first and last time into the hands of one man. But this was no other than Sir Robert Mansell, Admiral of the Fleet, a man of exceptional energy and a born fighter, one who had in early life had more than one brush with the Spaniards. King James, when approached on the subject of Mansell’s glass monopoly, marvelled that ‘Robin Mansell being a seaman, whereby he hath got so much honour, should fall from water to tamper with fire.’
The first we hear of Mansell in this connection is in the year 1615, when we find him associated with Sir Edward Zouche, Thelwell, Percivall, and others in a patent for making glass with sea-coal. But before this he had probably for some time been interested in certain London glass-works. And now before two years had elapsed he had bought out all his partners[[241]] and commenced his reign as ‘glass-king.’ This monopoly, in spite of frequently renewed opposition, Mansell succeeded in maintaining up to the time of his death in the days of the Protectorate. He hunted down the local glass-houses where wood, now forbidden by law, was still employed. He granted licences to some of the Lorrainers working at Stourbridge and elsewhere, while—as at Newcastle, where he had glass-works under his direct management—he took others of these foreigners into his employ. In London, on the other hand, at the glass-furnaces of Winchester House, which he now took over, Sir Robert employed Italians.
We here come into contact with another and not less interesting man, James Howell, like his master Mansell, a Welshman.[[242]] Howell was in 1618 ‘steward of the glasse-house’ in Southwark, but he was glad to change this position for that of traveller for Mansell in Spain and Italy; for, so he writes to his father, ‘I should in a short time have melted away to nothing among these hot Venetians.’ His duties were now to obtain workmen from Italy, and the raw materials, especially the ‘barillia,’ from Spain. In the following year he brought over one of the famous Miotti family from Middelburg, and not long afterwards we find him writing from Alicante an interesting account of the ‘Barillia, a strange kind of vegetable that grows nowhere upon the surface of the Earth, in that perfection as here.’ ‘The Venetians have it hence,’ he continues, and he proceeds to give a detailed account of the method of preparation (Book I. section I. xxv.). Howell’s letters from Venice are most interesting, and have provided many ‘elegant extracts’ for later writers. For instance, there is a passage in which he speaks of ‘lasses and glasses,’ and of the brittleness that beauty shares with the mirrors of Venice[[243]]—the rest of the passage is, however, rather too outspoken for our present taste.
The contention between Mansell and the anti-monopolists was above all warm about the year 1623, on the occasion of the renewal of his patent for another fifteen years, and the ‘New Patent,’ the ‘Reasons against the same,’ Mansell’s ‘Defence’ and his ‘Motives and Reasons,’ and finally the ‘Answer’ to this last, followed in quick succession. All these documents and pamphlets are reproduced by Mr. Hartshorne; they form indeed an important source of information for the history of English glass. From them we learn that Mansell, after many failures elsewhere and the expenditure of many thousand pounds, first at Newcastle successfully made window-glass with the native coal; that the clay for the pots was at the commencement brought from Staffordshire, but that as the English clay proved unsatisfactory, he obtained a better material at infinite cost ‘from beyond Roan in France,’ and finally from ‘Spawe in Germany.’ At the time he was writing he indeed protests that he had already sunk £24,000 in his ventures.
The precise position of Mansell after the expiration in 1638 of the second term of his patent is somewhat obscure, but he seems to have steered well among the troubles of the time and to have maintained his monopoly. At the period in question, he tells us he was producing ‘Ordinary Drinking Glasses’ for wine and for beer at four shillings and half a crown a dozen respectively, as well as mortar-glasses[[244]] at one-and-fourpence a dozen. He was at the same time making beer and wine glasses of crystal (these were from two to three times as dear as the last), beside looking-glasses and spectacle-glass plates in rivalry with the Venetians; finally, with English materials, window-glass and ‘green-glasses.’
There is nothing in all this, or indeed in any of these patents and petitions, to point to the existence of lead-glass at this time. The use of barilla, I may add, is incompatible with the preparation of a lead-glass; in such a glass it is essential that the alkali should be potash. On the whole, during the long period of the Mansell monopoly (from 1615 to, say, 1655) little progress appears to have been made in the manufacture of glass, but of course we must make allowance for the times of civil strife that filled the latter part of this period.
After the Restoration the issue of patents began again. Everything points at this time to a renewal of interest in Venetian glass. When, however, in 1663 the Duke of Buckingham obtained his licence, his claim was based upon the improvements he had made in the looking-glass plates and in the plates for the glass-coaches. As in France, sheets of large size and good material were now in demand for both purposes. It was somewhat later, it would seem, that he turned his attention to making hollow ware in the Venetian fashion. Although nitre, a salt of potash,[[245]] played an important part in the glass made by the duke, there is no proof that any use was made of red lead or of litharge. Evelyn, who in 1673 visited the duke’s ‘Italian glass-house at Greenwich where glasse was blown of finer metal than that of Murano at Venice,’ says nothing about such substances being employed.
But in spite of this progress in the home industry, the importation of chests of glass from Venice was at its height in the reign of Charles II. This we see from the correspondence of a London glass merchant, one John Greene (1667-1672), with a Venetian firm, which has fortunately been preserved.[[246]] Along with these letters were found the ‘office copies’ of the patterns which Greene sent out to Venice as a guide to the glass-blowers. Here we have mention of ‘clouded calsedonia glasses’ for beer, claret, and sack, ‘creuits with or without feet, brandj tumblers,’ and ‘glasse floure potts.’ Not the least interesting item is the ‘Rhenish wine glasse,’ which is illustrated by a typical roemer with prunts on the stem, almost our only evidence of the use of these goblets in England. Greene advises his Venetian correspondent that the looking-glasses and the coach-glasses are to be packed at the bottom of the cases to escape if possible the search of the custom-house officials. What especially strikes one in examining the patterns of the drinking-glasses, which form the bulk of the orders (Hartshorne, Plates 30-32), is the fact that the stem or shank, so important a part of the eighteenth-century glass, is not yet developed; the conical bowl is separated from the foot by a simple or fluted bulb, or sometimes by two such bulbs or knops.
But this Venetian trade had now seen its best days; there are some hints of a falling off in Greene’s last two letters (1671-1672). On the other hand, during all this period the enterprising glass firms of the Netherlands kept up a close intercourse with England. As early as 1662 a patent for making various kinds of glass was obtained by one John Colenet, whom Mr. Hartshorne has very plausibly claimed as a member of the great glass-making family of Ghent and Namur, the De Colnets, so often mentioned in the letters of M. Schuermans. A few years later the tables were turned, for now the De Colnet firm was fain to engage an Englishman to produce ‘verre à l’Angleterre.’ In 1680 the great rival firm of Liége, the De Bonhommes, according to a document quoted by M. Schuermans (Letter vii.), was already making ‘flint-glass à l’Anglaise.’
Now this statement brings me face to face with what is the great crux in the history of English glass—the question, namely, when and where lead-glass was first applied to the manufacture of hollow ware.
But first I must say a word of a little book published in 1662. This is the already-mentioned translation by Christopher Merret of the Arte Vetraria of Antonio Neri (see p. 7). Merret, who was a man well abreast of the science of his day and an early, if not an original, member of the newly founded Royal Society, has supplemented Neri’s series of recipes with certain ‘Observations’ of his own. Here may be found some curious information concerning the materials used in the manufacture of the cristallo, for it is with this glass that the author is chiefly concerned. Merret does not appear to have had much acquaintance with the glass made in England in his day. For the practical details of the furnace and for the processes of glass-blowing he takes us back to Agricola. Both Neri and his translator are indeed for the most part occupied with the nature and preparation of the materials, and with the various methods by which glass may be coloured.[[247]] Neri, like all the old writers, knew of the merits of lead-glass in the preparation of pastes for the manufacture of artificial gems; in his sixty-first section he tells us: ‘Glass of lead, known to few in this art, as to colour is the finest and noblest glass at this day made in the furnace. For in this glass the colours imitate the Oriental gems, which cannot be done in crystal. But unless diligence be used all sorts of pots will be broken, and the metal will run into the furnace.’ Upon this passage Merret observes: ‘Glass of Lead! ’Tis a thing unpractised in our furnaces, and the reason is because of the exceeding brittleness thereof.’ Lead, he continues, is indeed the principal ingredient in the glaze of the potter, ‘and could this glass be made as tough as Crystalline, ’twould far surpass it in the glory and beauty of its colours.’ Thus we see, with Merret as with Neri, the great merit of lead-glass is the capacity possessed by it of bringing out the colours of metallic oxides. They still regard the material from the mediæval point of view. The bad working qualities of this glass of which Merret complains may very probably have been due to the fact that, starting from the basis of their cristallo, the glass-workers continued to use the soda-holding barilla instead of employing a potash salt.
The Venetians in the preparation of their cristallo laid great stress on the hard white pebbles, the cogoli, from the bed of the Po or of the Ticino; these they regarded as an essential constituent of a good glass. We in England, during the reign of Charles II., succeeded in replacing these pebbles by our native flints; and this English flint-glass,[[248]] properly so-called, early acquired a good reputation on the Continent. The ingenious Mr. John Houghton, writing in 1683 (Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade), after speaking of our dependence upon the Venetians some years since, goes on to say: ‘Now by the fashion of using glasses in coaches and other good means we easily enough serve our neighbours.’ In 1682 he tells us there were exported from England two thousand five hundred and seventy-two drinking-glasses, besides some looking-glasses and ‘window chests.’ This confirms what I have said of the date when English flint-glass became well known in the Low Countries. Now it is generally taken for granted that by this time the term flint-glass had come to mean lead-glass. Certainly soon after the beginning of the next century lead-glass was already recognised as essentially a substance of English origin; but, as I have said, there is unfortunately not a word of evidence, documentary or otherwise, to show when or where this glass was first made, nor is it possible, I think, to point to any example of this lead-glass to which an earlier date than the first or second decade of the eighteenth century can be attributed. Indeed everything points to the English flint-glass of the last quarter of the seventeenth century being a form of the Venetian cristallo.
In any case it is essential to bear in mind that both in chemical composition and in physical properties no two things could be more unlike than the cristallo on which the early flint-glass, properly so called, was founded, and the lead-glass which afterwards usurped the name.[[249]] The one is a typical soda-lime, the other an equally definite potash-lead glass, and the materials had to be sought for from entirely different sources.
The above-mentioned Mr. John Houghton, who every week, in the commercial paper edited by him, published an article on some technical or scientific subject, in the spring of 1696 devoted a series of these ‘leaders’ to the subject of glass. After some general reflections on the substance, when we are told, among other things, that ‘Vitrification is the last mutation of bodies of which Nature is capable and from which there is no going back,’ in his issue of May 2 he takes up the main subject. ‘According to my information,’ he tells us, ‘we are of late greatly improved in the art of Glass-making. For I remember the time when the Duke of Buckingham first encouraged glass-plates, and Mr. Ravenscroft first made Flint-glass.[[250]] Since then we have mended our Window-glass and outdo all abroad. And what e’er may be said against Stock-Jobbery, yet it has been the Means to raise great Summs of Money to improve this Art.’ Again, on May 16 we are given a carefully classified list of ninety glass-houses existing in England. Of these, twenty-four were in London, nine at Bristol, seventeen at Stourbridge, and eleven at Newcastle. These glass-houses he divides into those for looking-glass plates, for bottles and for ‘Flint, Green, and Ordinary.’ Now the rational inference from all this seems to me to be that Houghton, who was in a position to know, knew nothing about lead-glass. The flint-glass houses are classed together with the ‘green’ and ‘ordinary,’ and flint-glass for him was glass made from flints.
So, as we have seen, Haudicquer de Blancourt, writing in France a few years earlier, knew nothing of lead-glass other than that used for objects of verroterie. It is at least evident that if our own glass-makers had mastered the art before the end of the century, the secret was well kept.[[251]]
But before proceeding further, it may be well to form some definite idea of the composition of lead-glass and of the physical properties that led to its replacing in great measure the soda-lime glass of Venetian type. In the first place, as I have said, it is essential that the alkali in this glass (in the manufacture of hollow ware, at least) should be potash, and it was, perhaps, the fact that the lead was at first used along with soda that so long delayed the production of a ‘metal’ suitable for the manufacture of blown-glass. Again, the potash in the case of lead-glass must be something quite different from the impure material employed for the old green glass; this crude alkali contained, among other bases, a large percentage of lime. Saltpetre appears to have been used in the first place, and then a more carefully lixiviated form of vegetable ashes known as pearl-ash. The amount of lead oxide may vary from 28 to 40 per cent., and the specific gravity of the resultant glass from 2·8 to 3·6.
The great merit of lead-glass lies in its absolute transparency and brilliancy, combined with a certain darkness in the shadows. This brilliancy and fire, it is well to point out, are only indirectly dependent upon the refractive power exercised by the glass upon the rays of light that pass through it; in this respect lead-glass differs little from rock crystal or from the Venetian cristallo. But one quality it has which distinguishes it from all other kinds of glass as well as from nearly all transparent natural stones, the diamond, of course, excepted. This is the power possessed by it of dispersing the rays of white light: the elements of which this light is composed in passing through lead-glass are bent aside in different degrees, so that the issuing ray is broken up into its component colours. This it is that gives fire, but this fire is only fully brought out by means of facetted or angular surfaces. On this point—the distinction between refraction and dispersion—a good deal of confusion exists. The following table, which I borrow from a little book on gems by Professor Church, may help to clear up this point:—
| Refractive Index. | Comparative Dispersing Power. | |
| Diamond, | 2·75 | 44 |
| Flint-glass, | 1·57 | 36 |
| Rock-crystal, | 1·55 | 14 |
| Plate and crown glass, | 1·52 | 15 |
We here see that lead-glass or flint-glass has little greater refractive power on light than rock crystal or the ordinary plate and crown glass of commerce which belongs to the same family as the cristallo of the Venetians. In dispersive power, on the other hand, it stands apart from both these substances and rivals the diamond in scattering the component rays of white light.
CHAPTER XX
ENGLISH GLASS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
We may probably regard the reign of William III. as the turning-point in the history of our English glass as in so many other of our minor arts. It is to that period that one must assign the first beginnings of our modern industrial life,[[252]] and it is in the Dutch influence, at that time so dominant, that the principal stimulus is to be found.
Of the window and mirror glass of the period a most interesting series is preserved at Hampton Court. Many of the panes of the windows facing the garden façades of the palace are strongly tinged with purple, a result of the process by which the colourless protoxide of manganese is reconverted into the purple bin-oxide under the influence of sunlight. Placed between the windows in William III.’s state bedroom are some curious mirrors with frames ornamented with appliqué plates of deep blue glass carved into patterns and monograms. Observe, too, a charming mirror of the same period over the fireplace in this room.
It is, however, still difficult to point to surviving examples to illustrate the vessels of English glass made about this period. Certain covered bowls (such as that reproduced by Mr. Hartshorne on p. 238 of his great work) may date back to the end of the seventeenth century. The same author gives an illustration of a fine posset-pot with quilled handles, preserved at Chastleton. This bowl, decorated with roses, masks, and berry-like prunts, may be as old as Charles II.’s reign. When one calls to mind the picturesque pottery—the slip-ware—that was made at the time, it would seem not unlikely that in the local glass-houses something similar may have been attempted in glass.
We have, of course, plenty of glass wine-bottles, a few of which may date as far back as the reign of Charles I. These bottles are mostly of a black impure glass and of a globular form, squat and compressed at the sides, reminding one of the leather botel from which our word bottle is derived. Similar bottles are found in the Low Countries, and they may often be seen in Dutch pictures. The introduction of the practice of bottling wine, as far as England is concerned, is generally connected with Sir Kenelm Digby, that universal genius who, in the reign of Charles I., was occupied with so many branches of the arts. Drinking-bottles of this description, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are often dug up while excavating the foundations of houses. An extensive collection, chiefly of local origin, may be seen in the Guildhall Museum, and Mr. Hilton Price has a representative series derived also from excavations in the city. The surface of these bottles is often covered with an iridescent scale giving them an appearance of great age. A circular stamp bearing the maker’s name is sometimes found on the shoulder, but these stamped bottles are in all cases, I think, of later date. There is a small collection of these stamps in the British Museum.
I have already pointed out that during the reign of Charles II. the prevalent form of the drinking-glass was still of the old Venetian type. The stem was almost non-existent; it was at best represented by a spherical bulb connecting the two cones—the upper one often truncated, the lower very shallow—that formed respectively the bowl and the foot. In the Spanish Netherlands, before the end of the century, another form became prevalent: the stem now assumes more or less a baluster form, divided from the bowl by a distinct shoulder; the knop of this stem is often hollow, and generally duplicated. In some cases a silver coin is found lying loose in this hollow bulb. Such a form we may perhaps regard as the starting-point for the vast and varied series of English drinking-glasses which constitutes the principal element in a collection of English glass.
Since the drinking-glass forms so important a part in the history of our native glass, perhaps it may be well to turn for a moment to consider the process by which a vessel of this sort is made, the more so as we are told by a high practical authority that in the manufacture of a wine-glass every principle of glass-blowing is illustrated (H. J. Powell, Principles of Glass-making, 1883). Wine-glasses, says Mr. Powell, may have either a ‘straw shank or stem’ pulled out from the substance of the bowl itself, or more often a ‘stuck shank’ made from a separate piece of glass subsequently added to the bowl; again, the foot may be either blown or cast.
I will take as an example a wine-glass with a ‘straw shank’ and a blown foot. ‘The glass for the bowl is first gathered and blown to the required shape. Upon the centre of the base of the bowl, which is still attached to the blow-pipe, a small quantity of molten glass is skilfully dropped from the end of a working rod [the pontil]. Part of the added glass is formed into a small button by the grip of the spring tool [procello], and the residue is pulled out into the stem. In the meantime a smaller bulb has been blown and its extremity fixed to the end of the stem from which the button has previously been removed. The smaller bulb is severed in the midst and the cup-shaped remnant adhering to the stem is reheated, opened by the insertion of one point of the spring tool, and by rapid rotation thrown out into a disc or foot by the agency of centrifugal force.’ The pontil is now attached to the foot by means of a seal of molten glass, and the upper bulb (the future bowl of the glass) ‘wetted off’ from the blowing-tube by the application of a moistened iron. The glass, held by the pontil attached to the foot, is completed by reheating the severed edges of what is now the bowl, cutting them even with the shears and rounding them by a second exposure to the fire. The now completed wine-glass is finally separated from the pontil by a jerk and taken to the annealing oven. A rough edge remaining where the pontil was attached is at the present day invariably smoothed by grinding; not so, however, in the case of the older glasses, and this is a point to be noted by the collector. In Germany and Bohemia the rough edge of the bowl after shearing is ground even on the wheel instead of being rounded off in the furnace, and foreign-made glasses may be often distinguished by their more angular rim.
We shall now be in a better position to attack that extensive and complicated series, the drinking-glasses of the eighteenth century. Mr. Hartshorne, who in his Old English Glasses[[253]] has treated the subject in great detail, mentions incidentally that he has made more than a thousand full-sized outlines of glasses that have passed through his hands. We must be content, then, to accept the classification of such an authority, although some of the divisions may seem a little arbitrary to one who has no claim to be an expert. Thus out of sixteen families of English eighteenth-century glass there are only two that contain any objects other than drinking-glasses in the narrower sense of the word; again, four or five of the groups are based chiefly upon the liquor—wine, beer, mead, mumm, syllabub, cider, cordial water, or punch—that these glasses were presumably made to contain. In a division of glasses from this latter point of view I shall only mention three heads which alone seem to me of sufficient importance to merit separate treatment—wine-glasses, glasses for ale and beer, and glasses for cordial waters—and even these, though varying in size, pass through the same series of shapes in bowl and stem. Again, a cross division may be made distinguishing the ruder and somewhat more solid household and tavern glasses from those destined for the table of the wealthy.
The main lines, however, of the classification of these drinking-glasses must be based upon the form of the bowl and upon the outline and construction of the stem. But first a word may be said of the relation of our eighteenth-century glasses to their predecessors and contemporaries on the Continent. On the whole, one may conclude that the new forms and methods of decoration grew up in Holland, in the Spanish Netherlands, or again in the Liége district, towards the end of the seventeenth century, when the old Italian influence was giving way to processes and schemes of decoration that had their origin in Germany and Bohemia. The methods of the great firms of the Bonhommes and the De Colnets were above all eclectic; the opaque-twisted stems of their glasses were essentially of Venetian origin, the engraved bowl had its prototype in Germany, and the material finally—the ‘metal’—before long was English.
In the case of the English glasses that followed in the same lines, the greatest care seems to have been given to the metal employed; next to that, the construction of the stem and the outline of the bowl received attention; on the other hand, the engraving on the bowl, compared to the contemporary work in Germany and the Netherlands, was for the most part of a summary, not to say rude character. As for the foot, the margin was generally slightly ‘welted’ or folded over from above, so that the glass stands only on the rim; by this the solidity of the foot is at the same time increased.[[254]] Otherwise the only variation of importance in the shape of the foot depends upon its greater or less flatness; in the earlier glasses the central part generally rises up to form a dome, upon which rests the base of the stem. The square bases with plinth-like steps belong to a much later time and are generally associated with facetted ware. It may be noted that the glasses of the eighteenth century stand on the whole on a relatively wider foot than those now made.
The first point of importance in considering the stem is to distinguish those that are drawn—these are the ‘straw-shanks,’ formed of the same piece of metal as the bowl—from the ‘stuck-shanks’ that are made of a separate piece of glass. The latter form by far the larger class. As regards the outline, the stem may be either a plain rod or cylinder, or again of baluster shape—this last but a modification of the double knops that constitute the whole shank of some seventeenth-century glasses. In other cases the stem is marked by spiral lines in relief—that is to say, it is ‘rib-twisted,’ or, finally, it may be cut into flat facets. But perhaps the most important division of the stems of our English glasses is that based upon the nature of the spiral lines of greater or less complexity so generally found in the interior of the cylinder of glass. These lines may be formed either by strings or bands of opaque white, or more rarely of coloured glass, or again by empty threads formed by drawing out a bubble of air. These are the opaque-twisted and the air-twisted stems respectively.
If now we turn to the outline of the main division of the glass, the bowl, this has been made the basis of a division that classes these bowls as straight-sided, waisted, bell-shaped, and finally, bowls with a curve resembling either the ogee or the double ogee of the architect.
2
1
3
ENGLISH WINE GLASSES
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
1. WITH SIXPENCE OF QUEEN ANNE WITHIN THE HOLLOW KNOP 2. ENGRAVED WITH PORTRAIT OF THE PRETENDER AND JACOBITE MOTTO 3. THE ULSTER “IMMORTAL MEMORY” GLASS
The air-drawn stem, if not an English invention, was certainly brought to great perfection here at an early period. We must seek the origin of this device in the large ‘blows,’ often of very irregular shape, that fill the knop or bulb on the stems of earlier glasses.[[255]] This ‘blow’ is sometimes prolonged into a sort of tail which passes down nearly to the foot. In other cases we find several smaller ‘tears’ in the same bulb, formed, it appears, by puncturing, while it is still soft, the little mass of glass destined to form the bulb, and then covering it with a second gathering. These air-beaded stems are mostly of Low Country origin; but they are of interest to us, as we may probably regard them as the starting-point of the air-twists which are formed by drawing out and twisting the original spherical mass, containing one or more of these bubbles or tears. It may be mentioned that in a general way a loose, widely spaced spiral is characteristic of the earlier glasses, while the tightly twisted stems are only found on late examples. This applies also to the spirals on the rib-twisted stems of plain glass. There is another point that should not be overlooked: this is that the twist on eighteenth-century glasses always descends from right to left, while in modern imitations the reverse direction is generally taken.
Perhaps the earliest type of English glass is one with a waisted bowl, engraved with a full-blown rose, and supported on a rib-twisted stem; but those on stems loosely air-twisted may sometimes be as old.
There is a glass in the British Museum with a bell-shaped bowl engraved with a rose, a pink, and a third flower of undetermined species; this we may take as a good type of the earlier drinking-glass. The bowl is divided from the air-twisted stem by a hollow bulb containing a sixpence of Charles II. dated 1679. It will be noted how closely the berry-like stamps on the bulb resemble the prunts on the stem of a roemer; they occur again on the already mentioned posset-cup from Chastleton. Such decoration may, perhaps, be regarded as characteristic of the English glass of the end of the seventeenth century.
The opaque-twisted stem formed, on the same system as the Venetian vetro di trina, from rods containing threads of opaque white glass or latticinio, is on the other hand not a specially English type. Such stems were in great favour in the Low Countries and in the north of France, and it is even possible that the rods of glass from which our English examples are formed may have been imported from Venice or from the Netherlands.[[256]] The white lines are sometimes combined with air-twists to form complicated patterns.
The glasses with straight-sided bowls may, on the whole, be attributed to an early period, and together with the contemporary bell-shaped glasses they constitute an essentially English class. Those again with the so-called ogee bowls are especially associated with the Bristol glass-houses. Glasses with bowls of this outline form nearly one-third of the extensive collection of Mr. Singer, which was formed for the most part, as I have already mentioned, in the neighbourhood of that town.
I now turn to the engraved designs that are found upon the bowls of most of these eighteenth-century glasses. There is not much to be said for the inventive powers or for the technical skill shown by the engraver. Indeed, considering the general low level of the engraved work, there is some temptation to find a Dutch or Flemish origin for any specimen of engraving that shows superior technical or artistic qualities; and there is little doubt that in the case of the earlier pieces at least, such an attribution would be justified.[[257]]
The design that we find most frequently on our eighteenth-century glasses is a rose branch with, on the opposite side, a butterfly. This motive is found on the bell-shaped bowls of early glasses with air-twisted stems. With certain modifications it continued long in use. The rose, with the change of fashion after the middle of the century, became more naturalistic, and the butterfly often takes the form of a moth. Other designs have reference to the beverage destined to be drunk from the glass: for wine-glasses, bunches of grapes and vine-leaves (often accompanied by a humming-bird); ears of barley for beer-glasses; and in the few rare cases where an apple-tree forms part of the design, we may associate the glass with cider. The popular cries—‘No Excise,’ or ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ and ‘No. 45’—which are sometimes found on glasses towards the middle of the century,[[258]] remind us of the new fashion that came in about that time of finding in the decoration of pottery or other ware an opportunity for political propaganda, and for the glorification of the hero of the day. There was not much to be done in this way on the restricted space at command on the bowls of our glasses; towards the end of the century, however, naval emblems are frequently to be found, and the Nelson glasses form a group by themselves.
But of all the glasses that are thus ‘made to speak,’ to use the expression of the great Napoleon, who had strong opinions as to the advantages of this method of political réclame, the most interesting class is formed by the treasured Jacobite glasses, bearing mottoes and emblems of a more or less cryptic character, or, more rarely, portraits of the young or the old Pretender engraved on the bowl.[[259]] The extraordinary fascination exercised over some minds by what George Borrow used to call ‘Charlie-over-the-waterism,’ is nowhere better exhibited than in the almost devotional tone with which this subject is approached by more than one of our authorities. The more important of these glasses, especially the large ones with drawn stems, and those with baluster or rather double-knopped stems, are probably of foreign origin; at all events they were engraved in the north of France or in the Low Countries. Of the rare examples with the head of the young Pretender surrounded by a wreath of laurels, there are very few specimens in our public museums: I can only call to mind a small glass from the Schreiber collection at South Kensington and one or two examples lately presented to the British Museum ([Plate XLIV.]). The most frequent emblem is the rose with two buds, traditionally, I believe, regarded as symbolical of James II. with his son and grandson, although to one not in the inner circle of the cause the relation of the equipoised buds to the central flower would seem rather to point to the old Pretender and his two sons Charles Edward and Henry.[[260]]
As to the inscriptions on these glasses, we find in one instance four stanzas from the Jacobite version of ‘God save the King’ engraved on the bowl. But in most cases the allusion to the cause is of a more disguised character. The commonest of all is the single word ‘Fiat,’ the motto of the Jacobite society known as the Cycle, which flourished in the west of England during the greater part of the eighteenth century.
I may note that among the Jacobite glasses treasured up in many an old house in the west and north of England, one rarely comes across any example that cannot be classed more or less accurately as a wine-glass. Quite exceptional is the decanter engraved with a circular compass-card pointing to a star, between oak leaves and roses (Hartshorne, Plate 64). This decanter is one of a pair preserved, along with as many as eleven of the above mentioned ‘Fiat’ glasses, in the early Jacobean house at Chastleton, on the borders of Oxfordshire and Worcestershire.[[261]] Here also are many other pieces of old English glass to more than one of which I have already referred.
Although the history of English glass during the eighteenth century—it would be more accurate perhaps to say from about 1670 to 1770—tends always to fall back upon the drinking-glass, yet during that time the material was applied also to the manufacture of many other objects. We find in the earlier records frequent reference to large vessels of glass, blown or cast; this was indeed the case as far back as the time when Chiddingfold was the centre of glass-making. A favourite form at the end of the seventeenth century—but here again a drinking-glass—was the ‘yard,’ an exaggerated outgrowth of the Venetian or Low Country ‘flute.’ Thus Evelyn, describing the ceremonies on the occasion of the proclamation of James II., says that at Bromley the king’s health was ‘drunk in a flint glasse of a yard long.’ Some time before this, in 1669, on the occasion of a visit to the glass-house at Blackfriars, the same writer mentions the ‘singing glasses’ that he there had made for him, and which ‘make an echo to the voice ...’ but ‘were so thin that the very breath broke one or two of them.’ At a later time trumpets were made of glass, and some of these have survived.
But few examples, however, of what may be called miscellaneous glass of an earlier date than the seventies of the eighteenth century have been preserved. It was about this time that a great change must have come over the manufacture, though on this point we have strangely little direct information. This period, we know, was a critical one in the history of the minor arts both in England and in France. In the latter country, the simpler and more classical style associated with the reign of Louis XVI. replaced the more unrestrained forms of the Louis Quinze period some years before the death of the latter king. In England we see the new shapes first in the work of the silversmith about the year 1770, and soon after they are well represented in the Chelsea-Derby porcelain. In the case of glass this change is above all to be associated with the increased use of facetting. Flat facets divided by obtuse angles may indeed be found at times on the stems and shoulders of drinking-glasses almost from the commencement of the century. But now these facets take a purely geometrical form. The dishes and basins of the time simply bristle with sharp-pointed pyramids, so that these heavy, solid vessels can scarcely be lifted with impunity.
Now for the first time full advantage was taken of the power possessed by the heavy lead-glass of dispersing the rays of light, for only by the use of these facets was the full fire of the glass developed. This is indeed—so at least it seems to me—the one really important period in the history of English glass. It was not long after this time, towards the end of the century, that use was for the first time made of machinery for driving the grinding-wheels. The glass, whose general outline had been previously determined in the mould, was now quickly channelled with intersecting furrows. There is at South Kensington a small collection of the earlier facetted glass, presented by Mr. H. B. Lennard, which contains some pieces of real artistic merit. This was the period when the square plinth-like base was in fashion—not perhaps in itself a very desirable form. In the Lennard collection are two carved cups with these square feet: the bowl in each case is surrounded by deeply cut gadroons curving as they descend; on other parts the usual facets are found ([Plate XLV.] 1). There is a fine sculpturesque feeling about the treatment of these standing cups that carries one back to far earlier days—in fact I know of no other specimens of English glass where such full advantage has been taken of the qualities of the material, and this without any abuse or exaggeration.[[262]]
STANDING CUP, WITH COVER, ON SQUARE FOOT
ENGLISH, END OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
BOWL ON SQUARE FOOT
ENGLISH, END OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
But for the most part—above all after the end of the century—the facetting runs wild; sometimes it covers the whole surface, and even where there are no facets the ground is marked out by rectangular divisions. The decoration as a whole is mechanically executed. But even this machine-made work is better than the cheap imitations of later days produced by pressing the glass into moulds of metal.
The cutting, or rather the grinding, of the glass was effected on a cast-iron wheel. A number of these wheels were fixed on a horizontal shaft; a workman seated in front of each held the glass against the revolving face. The actual abrading in such a case is done by the gritty particles of the sand, which mixed with water falls in a continuous stream from the hopper above. After smoothing on a stone wheel, the surface was polished on a wheel or ‘lap’ of willow-wood (or sometimes of lead), first by means of pumice or rotten stone and then with putty powder. Engraving, in the Bohemian or German sense, held a subordinate position, and when made use of, for the better sort of work at least, foreigners were generally employed. The outlines were then cut by minute copper wheels with the aid of finely pulverised emery powder mixed with oil, as in the case of the German glass.[[263]]
As I have said, it was above all this facetted ware—‘l’article Anglais, solide et comfortable mais sans élégance,’ as a French writer calls it—that spread the renown of English glass through the length and breadth of Europe.
At that time the famous English flint-glass was made by mixing three parts of pure sand, well washed and burned (from Alum Bay, Lynn, or Reigate), with two parts of red lead or litharge and one part of carbonate of potash. A small fraction of saltpetre and a little oxide of manganese were subsequently added to cleanse the metal. The potash, up to the middle of the last century, was introduced in the form of pearl-ash imported from Canada or Russia, and the litharge came from the refineries where silver was extracted from the native lead. In fusing the glass, great importance was attached to the quick melting of the materials at the full heat of the furnace, and to the subsequent rapid working of the pot. Our English glass industry was nearly ruined by the enormous excise duties, collected on the most arbitrary and artificial system, to which it was subjected both before and after the close of the great war. When on the repeal of these taxes the industry ‘rose from its ashes,’ it was conducted on a purely commercial basis.
I have already called attention to the important part played by Bristol in the manufacture of glass during the eighteenth century. That town obtained at this time a unique distinction in the history of English glass, as the one spot where a distinct kind of ware—a special genre—was made. It cannot be precisely stated when the opaque white glass decorated with enamel colours was first made at Bristol; what record we have does not take us further back than the latter half of the eighteenth century. This glass was apparently very brittle, and would not stand heat, a fact which may account for the few examples that have survived. In general character the Bristol lattimo closely resembles the other imitations of porcelain made with glass, which were so much in vogue at the beginning of the century. I have already mentioned the opaque white glass of Orleans, of Barcelona, and of Venice. Mr. Hugh Owen has collected at the end of his excellent work on Bristol porcelain (Two Centuries of Ceramic Art in Bristol, 1873) some curious information about this glass, from the account-book of a local enameller, one Edkins. The ledger in question contains entries from 1762 to 1787. According to an analysis made by Professor Church, the opaque Bristol glass contains an exceptionally large quantity of lead—as much as 44 per cent., it would seem—and, what is certainly remarkable, less than one per cent. of tin. It is to this substance, however, seeing that neither phosphate of lime nor arsenic[[264]] is present, that we must attribute its opacity.
Mr. Owen thinks that in whiteness and in softness of texture this Bristol ware exceeds all other opaque glasses of the kind, and comes nearer than any of them in aspect to the soft-paste porcelain of the day. According to the papers left by the above-mentioned Edkins, the better kinds—these were above all tea-poys, enamel-painted in the manner of the contemporary Bristol porcelain—were decorated in the usual way with coloured fluxes melted on in the muffle-stove. But the common articles ‘were simply painted with oil colours mixed with a desiccator and dried hard by artificial heat.’[[265]]
In the Schreiber collection at South Kensington may be seen a pair of candlesticks with twisted stems made of this white opaque Bristol glass. They are well painted with flowers and butterflies on a white chalky ground. At a later time some passable imitations of Venetian glass decorated with white threads in a ruby ground were made at Bristol, as well as bottles splashed with purple, black, and white, after the manner of a French and Venetian ware of the seventeenth century that has already been described. The glass-works at Nailsea, nine miles south-west of Bristol, were established in 1788 and survived to the middle of the last century. To the earlier years of these works may be attributed some jugs of yellowish-green glass, with large splashes of white, that turn up at times in the west of England.
James Tassie (born 1735), the Glasgow stonemason, applied the experience he had gained in the modelling of portrait heads in wax to the reproduction of antique gems in coloured pastes. The bright colours of these compare unfavourably with the delicate hues of the glass intaglios that have come down from classical times. But Tassie, both James and his nephew William, also made portrait medallions of a comparatively large size, using a nearly opaque glass paste or frit, more or less resembling porcelain. This paste was formed, it is said, of ‘a finely powdered glass and finely powdered pigments, annealed by being placed in a reverbatory furnace.’ This is a substance of some interest to us, and we may perhaps find in it points of resemblance to the ‘pâte de verre’ employed lately by M. Henri Cros (see [Chap. XXII.]).
I can only mention one other local variety of glass. In Ireland, towards the end of the eighteenth century, more than one attempt was made to encourage the manufacture. Some large fruit-dishes of heavy cut-glass, and others in the form of open baskets adorned with festoons, have been traced back to glass-houses established at Waterford about the year 1780. This glass is distinguished by a more or less faint blue tinge derived from a minute quantity of cobalt in the ‘metal.’ The gilding that was largely applied to these vessels was burned in by means of borax, and where the gold has come away the surface of the glass is rough and pitted.
CHAPTER XXI
THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY GLASS OF PERSIA, INDIA, AND CHINA
I shall now devote a short chapter to the glass made in Asia, that is to say in Persia, in India, and in China, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This later Asiatic glass, though so thoroughly Oriental in character, can as a whole scarcely be regarded as a product of strictly indigenous growth, for in nearly all cases the technique of the manufacture, in some indeed the materials and even the ‘metal’ itself, can be traced back to Europe. It is for this reason that I have reserved its treatment to this late stage.
We are fortunate in possessing in the Oriental galleries at South Kensington, as well as in the British Museum, a comparatively rich series of examples of this later Oriental glass, not a few of them of great beauty and interest. As a class it can probably be studied nowhere so well as in London.
The Chinese glass of the eighteenth century is above all of interest to us, for upon it more than upon anything else is based the only new departure in the treatment of the material that the nineteenth century can lay claim to—the ‘New Glass,’ I mean, that has taken so important a place of late among the minor art products of France. It is therefore not altogether illogical that this glass of the Far East should find a place in our history between the English glass of the eighteenth century and that now being made in France.
The glorious enamelled glass of the Saracens, of which I have given some account in a former chapter, was already a thing of the past before the end of the fifteenth century. This was at least the case in Syria and Egypt, where alone the art as we know it had flourished. I have attributed this sudden decline, as regards the first country, to the invasion of Timur early in the century. On this occasion a whole army of craftsmen was transferred, it is said, from Damascus to Timur’s new capital at Samarkand. In Egypt the narrow-minded fanaticism of the later Memlûk Sultans and the troubles that preceded the Turkish conquest were doubtless factors in the artistic decline. As far as the Mohammedan East is concerned, there is thus an obscure period in our history extending to the end of the sixteenth century for which there is little or nothing to show. Glass of some sort doubtless continued to be made in Syria, and perhaps in Egypt, but little that is distinctive or of artistic interest was produced.
When we again come upon specimens of Oriental glass, it is no longer in the Mediterranean countries but in Persia, and to a less extent in Northern India, that we find them. Not only so, but the glass that we now have to deal with is of an entirely different character. With a few rare exceptions, the thick jewel-like enamels of the Syro-Egyptian school are now as much a thing of the past as the carved glass of a still earlier time.
The Persian Glass of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is, as a whole, thin and transparent, either simply blown or in part moulded. In spite of the purely Oriental character of the outlines of this glass, the influence of Venetian methods in the preparation and modes of working is in most cases apparent. As I have said, it would be out of the question to treat of this later Oriental glass, little of which is probably earlier than the seventeenth century, before we had acquired some knowledge of the renaissance glass of Italy.
GLASS Of PERSIAN TYPE, FROM A TOMB AT BAKU
VINCENT ROBINSON COLLECTION
Whether Timur or his successors succeeded in establishing the Syrian glass industry in the Khanates of Turkestan we do not know. There is a vague tradition that in the fifteenth century the glass of Samarkand was the finest in the East. It is, however, to a much later time that the earliest specimens of what I may call the Veneto-Persian family of glass belong—to the time of the Sufi dynasty in Persia and to that of the Moguls in Northern India.
Of Persian glass there indeed still exist a few rare examples which may perhaps date from an earlier time. I have already referred (p. [172]) to the little drinking-bowl of honey-coloured glass in the British Museum decorated with enamels of good quality—turquoise, red and white ([Plate XXVII.] 1). The figure of an angel upon it is thoroughly Persian in character; not only in the enamels, but in the horny quality of the honey-coloured metal, this little bowl closely resembles the spherical lamp ornament mentioned on p. [156], that has very properly been placed beside it on the shelf of the Museum.
Among the few pieces of later Oriental glass in the Slade collection is a small covered bowl, probably of Persian origin, with a formal design of iris and other flowers. In spite of the somewhat modern air of this bowl, due perhaps to the solid and rather crude gilding, the thick, semi-transparent enamels, blue and pale green, take us back to the earlier Saracenic work.
But such examples are quite exceptional. As a rule, on the glass brought back from Persia—there is quite a large collection at South Kensington and a few choice pieces in the British Museum—the enamelling, if present at all, is of the poorest description—it belongs essentially to our ‘painted’ class. This enamelled decoration, as on some little bottles at South Kensington, appears to be but a rude imitation of the floral patterns that we see, for example, on the lacquered bindings of Persian books.
On the other hand, the tall-necked flasks of thin glass—scent-sprinklers and wine-bottles—give proof of considerable manipulative skill ([Plate XLVII.]). To judge by the patterns in low relief on the sides, many of these vases, in spite of the thinness of the glass, must have been blown into a mould. The tall neck ends either in a flat-spreading lip or is bent over into that characteristic Persian form—not unlike the head of a bird with large beak—of which we may see an imitation or at least a kindred shape in certain Venetian double-necked cruets. At one time a fashion prevailed of fitting into the interior of these thin flasks elaborate bouquets of flowers built up with coloured enamels of opaque glass, a somewhat childish fancy, reflecting the weaker side of later Persian art.
Of more interest is the ruder glass, often decorated with a profusion of appliqué strips, quilled and worked up with the pincers. In such examples we are strikingly reminded both of a class of peasant glass from the South of Spain, and again of the late Roman glass from the Rhine and other districts.
On the other hand, certain bowls and vases of deep blue glass, decorated with floral designs in a solid gilding, have an almost unpleasantly modern air. A pair of vases so decorated, now in the British Museum, came, however, from the Strawberry Hill collection, and they may well date from the early eighteenth century.
Finally, I will mention a remarkable variety of glass worked generally into the form of tall, thin-necked flasks; within the greenish transparent metal float irregular masses of an opaque deep red. We have here, in fact, the elements of which the famous Chinese glazes—the flambé and the sang-de-bœuf—are made up. As in these glazes, so in this case in the glass, the effect doubtless depends on the partial reduction of the incorporated copper-oxide.
I should add that engraved glass seems never to have found much favour with the Persians. On the few specimens that we have in our collections—they are decorated with birds and flowers rudely ground on the wheel—the work is of the poorest description.
GLASS MADE IN PERSIA
SEVENTEENTH OR EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
I have so far taken it for granted that the bulk of this glass is of comparatively modern origin, and I have found confirmation for this opinion in the close relation of so much of it to the glass made at Murano in the seventeenth century. Still more definite evidence is, however, at hand, as the following passage from the travels of Sir John Chardin will show.[[266]]
‘There are Glass-Houses all over Persia, but most of the Glass is full of Flaws and Bladders and is Greyish from the account doubtless that the Fire lasts but three or four days, and that their Deremne as they call it, which is a sort of Broom, which they use to make it, does not bear heat so well as ours. The Glass of Chiras is the finest in the Country; that of Ispahan on the contrary is the sorriest, because it is only glass melted again. They make it commonly in Spring. They do not understand to Silver their Glass over, therefore their Glass Looking-glasses are brought from Venise, as also their sash glasses [glaces de châssis] and their pretty Snuff-Bottles. Moreover, the Art of Glass-making was brought into Persia within these last four score Years. A Beggarly and Covetous Italian taught it at Chiras for the sum of fifty Crowns. Had I not been informed of the matter, I should have thought that they had been beholded to the Portuguese for their Skill in so noble and so useful an Art. I ought not to forget to acquaint you with the Persian Art of Sowing Glass together very ingeniously, ... for provided the Pieces be not smaller than one’s Nail, they sow them together with Wyre and rub the seam over with a little white Lead or with calcined Lime, mixed with White of Egg, which hinders the water from soaking thro. Among their Sentences there is a goodly one relating to the ingenious piece of work just mentioned: If broken glass be restored again, how much more may Man be restored again after his Dissolution in the Grave?’
Closely connected with this Persian glass is the deep amber or honey-coloured glass, said to have been made in the island of Rhodes. A small collection of rudely executed bottles, pilgrims’ flasks and bowls, obtained in that island and in Cyprus, may be seen at South Kensington; they are there ascribed to the sixteenth century, I do not know on what grounds. These little vessels are all of the simplest shapes, such as could be formed directly from the paraison at the end of the blowing-iron, without removing the glass to the pontil. Some small hand-grenades of greenish black or of opaque jasper glass in the British Museum, come for the most part from Cyprus.
I may here say a word of the glass still in use in the Mohammedan East. At the present day the glass-works at Hebron, which I have already more than once mentioned, supply most of the common native glass in use both in Egypt and Syria[[267]]—of that of European origin there is no need to speak. Edward Lane describes the small conical lamps of thin glass ‘having a little tube at the bottom in which is stuck a wick twisted round a piece of straw.’ This is an old type of lamp that I have dwelt upon in a former chapter. Perhaps the most interesting form of glass vessel now in use in Cairo and Damascus is the covered sherbet-jug or bowl—the Kulleh. I have before me an example from Cairo made of a nearly opaque white glass, decorated with floral designs rudely painted on and perhaps not fired. Where this glass is made I do not know. We may perhaps regard the ware as a survival of the lattimo of the early eighteenth century (cf. Lane, Modern Egyptians, 1842, vol. i. p. 224).
BASIN, ENAMELLED WITH WHITE FLOWERS ON GOLD GROUND
INDIAN, SEVENTEENTH OR EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Indian Glass.—The classical writers had a tradition that the best glass in the world was made in India, thanks above all to the use of a pure rock crystal in the manufacture. There are some vague references to glass in the later Sanscrit literature, and in one of the older, but not the oldest, of the Hindu books, a distinction is made between a vessel of glass and one made of crystal. But it would be useless to search in the Hindustan of to-day for any examples of so early a date. Apart from a few beads which may be assigned to Buddhist times,[[268]] I can point to no examples of Indian glass of earlier date than the Mogul dynasty. It is to that period—hardly, indeed, before the later seventeenth century—that we must attribute certain remarkable examples of glass, found for the most part in Delhi, which are now in the Indian Department at South Kensington. There may be seen an example of enamelled glass of great beauty ([Plate XLVIII.]). This is a vase of somewhat milky glass with spreading mouth, some eleven inches in diameter; it is described as a washing-basin; the gilt ground is semé with little white flowers, each with a red pistil. Of no less interest are the two hookah-bases of engraved white glass. On these the technique of the engraved work—but not the Oriental design of conventional flowers—much resembles that of the Bohemian cut-glass; there are no incised lines, and the oval depressions representing the leaves are carefully polished. Unlike the engraved glass of Persia, the work shows signs of a complete mastery of the process. It will be noticed that in the case of one of these vessels the clear cristallo is unchanged, while in the other the glass is, as it were, frosted, apparently by the incipient decay of the surface. In the same case may be seen some tall vases of thin white glass, of a type very similar to the Persian sprinklers. These also come from Northern India.
It would be useless to search for an early native origin for work of this kind. Were it, however, possible to find in India any glass that we could connect with the Turki Khanates of Bokhara and Samarkand, the old homes of the Mogul family, we should thereby be provided with a connecting link that would not unlikely carry us back to the Syrian enamelled glass of the fourteenth century (see above, p. [168]). But nothing of the kind, as far as I know, has so far turned up in Hindustan. On the whole, this Mogul glass, in spite of the exceptional artistic and technical qualities of the specimens just described, belongs to that bastard school of Saracenic art that is prevalent generally in the north of India. Its artistic parentage may probably be traced back to Venice by way of Persia. Equally Persian in character are the four-sided bottles painted with figures and flowers, somewhat in the style of the Cashmiri lacquer. A remarkable series of little flasks of this character, formerly in the Marryat collection, may be seen in the Indian Department at South Kensington, where, however, they are described as ‘Indo-Dutch.’
It is certainly disappointing to find in India such a total absence of native glass with any claim to antiquity. But some consolation may be derived from the discovery—for discovery it may be called—made not many years ago, that in more than one part of Hindustan, native craftsmen were turning out vessels of glass by a strangely primitive method. Sir Purdon Clarke, who has always had at heart the maintenance of the native industries of the country on the old lines, tells me that this modern Indian glass was first noticed at Calcutta, and with some difficulty traced to Patna. Here, by the most primitive methods, the native workmen were turning out among other things imitations of European lamp-glasses. The furnace consisted of a series of elaborate passages hidden beneath a heap of ashes. These chambers were originally formed by a scaffolding of cardboard frames which, when the arrangement was completed, were set on fire.
Somewhat more ambitious are the furnaces which Mr. H. C. Dobbs found in use in the neighbourhood of Benares and Lucknow (Journal of Indian Art, vol. vii.). The material here employed was either imported or ‘country’ glass, but we are not told how the latter was prepared. The little circular ovens, less than five feet in height, are rudely built up of clay; there are two cylindrical chambers back to back, each of two stories, but of the four compartments thus formed three are devoted to the gradual cooling of the wares. It seems doubtful whether in these furnaces the glass is ever thoroughly melted, and though use is certainly made, in a primitive way, of the blowing-tube, the method of working resembles rather the treatment of a piece of iron in the blacksmith’s forge. The glass is constantly reheated and patted and pressed.[[269]] We are, indeed, reminded of the preparation of the Egyptian glass of the Eighteenth Dynasty, as interpreted by Dr. Petrie (cf. p. [22]). How far the Indian glass-maker in his methods of work is carrying on an old native tradition, or how far he is merely adapting what he has learned from Persian or European glass-blowers to the exigencies of his surroundings, I must leave an open question. I think, however, that in nearly all cases his starting-point is either with a mass of imported ‘metal,’ or with fragments of broken glass.
In the Indian Department at South Kensington may be seen a most remarkable collection of this native glass, obtained in part from Patna and in part from Hoshiarpur, in the Punjab.[[270]] This glass is of the greatest interest and should be closely examined. It is for the most part of various shades of blue and green, but these shades seem to be due to copper rather than to iron; at least we do not meet with the well-known olive greens derived from the latter metal. But the most striking peculiarity—the charm, I may say—of this glass is due to the presence of minute bubbles, so numerous and closely packed that the glass is little better than translucent. To the presence of these bubbles is also due the peculiar waxy aspect of the surface, and this with the irregular outline lends to this simple ware a plastic appearance as if moulded by the hand. Some use is made also of an opaque yellow glass, and among the examples from Patna are some decorated with bands of lattimo. The shapes call for no special comment: I will only point to certain curious little scorpion-shaped scent-bottles with twisted tails, and to the large torque bangles, as worthy of notice. Of greater interest is the primitive arrangement for distilling—a combination of aludel and alembic that calls to mind the illustrations to the Syriac manuscripts that I have mentioned in a former chapter. Perhaps the principal charm of this native Indian glass arises from the violent contrast that it affords to the impeccable cristallo and to the flint-glass that have tyrannised over us so long in Europe. It is beginning at length to dawn upon us that there are other qualities than absolute transparency and absence of colour to be looked for in our material, and it is the attempt to bring these qualities into prominence that has led to the development in France within the last few years of quite a new treatment of glass.
Glass in China.[[271]]—There are frequent references in Chinese literature to a substance called liu-li, which the best authorities tell us may be regarded as a more or less opaque variety of glass. This liu-li is, in the old books, always closely associated with rock crystal and jade, and was, indeed, like these stones, classed among the ‘seven precious things’; we also find it described as ‘thousand year old ice.’ When towards the end of the first century of our era an attempt was made by the emperors of the Han dynasty to establish commercial relations with the Roman West, this liu-li was one of the substances most sought after. The Chinese of this time were, it would seem, acquainted with the Roman Empire, but probably only with the eastern provinces. The Ta-tsin of their early writers has been identified by Dr. Hirth with Syria, and its capital Antu with Antioch: in these parts at that time they would have had no difficulty in obtaining the glass that they were in search of. It is indeed not impossible that it may have been this new and exotic material that first turned their attention to the glazing of their pottery, for it is doubtful if they were acquainted with the process before this time.
Again, in the fifth century some merchants who visited North-west India are said to have learned there the secrets of glass-making, and on their return to China to have produced liu-li of all colours by the smelting of various minerals. Once more, in the thirteenth century, we hear of glass being made by the melting together of certain stones and drugs, and the word po-li—the name given generally to transparent glass, in opposition to the more or less opaque liu-li—is now used for the first time.
On the other hand, in the annals of the Sui dynasty (581-617) we are told that China had long lost the art of making glass, but that a high official of the court succeeded at that time in fashioning vessels of green porcelain that could not be distinguished from liu-li (Bushell, Chinese Ceramic Art, p. 20). The inference that we must draw from these contradictory statements is probably that, in spite of many assertions to the contrary,[[272]] the art of glass-making was never thoroughly acclimatised in China till much later times. And this conclusion is confirmed by the total absence in our collections of any examples of glass of native manufacture that can be referred to a date earlier than the eighteenth century.[[273]] For although we know that after the return of Marco Polo both the Venetians and Genoese found in China a market for their beads, if not for more important objects of glass, and that early in the fifteenth century specimens of Saracenic enamelled glass found their way to the Chinese ports, the evidence that any true glass was at that time made in China is of the vaguest character.[[274]]
When we come to the eighteenth century we are on firmer ground. Before the end of the seventeenth century glass-works had been established under the superintendence of the Jesuit missionaries, within the precincts of the Imperial Palace at Pekin. At a later time, not long after the accession of Kien-lung (1735-1795), we hear of a famous glass-worker, one Hu.[[275]] This Hu was a craftsman in the Imperial glass-works, and there made both ‘a clear glass of greenish tint with an embossed decoration executed in coloured glass, and an opaque white glass which was either engraved with etched designs or decorated in colours’ (Bushell, Oriental Ceramic Art, p. 400). It is a significant fact that though the emperor much admired the glass of Hu, his first thought was to have it imitated in porcelain, the more noble material.
Let us now turn to the specimens of Chinese glass that we find in our museums. What is probably the largest and most representative collection in Europe is now in the Museum of Industrial Art at Berlin. Here are more than four hundred examples brought together by the care of Herr von Brandt, formerly German minister at Pekin.[[276]] Smaller but representative collections of Chinese glass may be seen both at South Kensington and in the British Museum.
On a few of these pieces is found the date-mark—the nien-hao—of the reigning emperor engraved on the base. As far as I am aware, the earliest mark so found is that of Yung-Ching (1722-1735), on a vase in the Berlin Museum. The name of Kia-King (1795-1821) has also been noted, but by far the most frequent mark is that of Kien-lung (1735-1795), of whom I have already spoken in connection with Hu of ‘the ancient moon.’ Probably most of our finest specimens of Chinese glass date from the second half of the eighteenth century, and to that period we may no doubt refer a series of magnificent examples of blown glass at South Kensington. These large pieces, of such excellent metal and showing so complete a command of technique, may probably be regarded, in spite of the Arabic inscriptions found on one or two of them, as a result of the teaching of the Jesuit missionaries; they were perhaps made by remelting imported glass. Notice especially the huge bowl or flower-pot with scalloped edge, built up, by some sort of ‘casing’ process, of two layers of glass, the inner, nearly opaque, of pale blue, the outer, dark blue and transparent. This bowl bears the date-mark of Kien-lung and is a triumph of technical skill. Not less remarkable are the two large vases of deep purple glass, bearing on the sides and necks large medallions with Arabic inscriptions in relief on a ground apparently chipped with a tool.[[277]] Of even greater interest are the two covered bowls of transparent cobalt glass with a quaint design built up of the smooth Chinese dragon or salamander and of the character for ‘long life.’ The part not engraved is curiously wrinkled or pitted, so as to form a sort of epidermis on the surface—by what means I do not know. The Chinese succeeded in making a yellow glass of a fine deep tint; a variety of this with opaque spots—the ‘rice-grain’ structure—is apparently much prized. Of the mottled red and yellow glass, made it would seem in imitation of tortoise-shell, there are many examples in our collections. We are reminded by it of some of the effects of the flambé glazes; the prevailing colour given to this glass is, however, of an orange rather than a blood-red tint ([Pl. XLIX.] 2).
CHINESE GLASS
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
But in spite of these early technical triumphs, blown glass has always remained something of an exotic in China. To the Chinese mind, glass—a material never held in much esteem—is above all a substance to be employed in the imitation of precious marbles and gems. Lacking itself all classical and literary associations, glass can only find a reflected honour from these more noble substances. With this object in view, the skilled Chinese craftsmen were soon able to produce the most marvellous tours de force, and indeed to develop an entirely new treatment of the material—a method of handling which, at all events since the best Roman times, had been elsewhere completely neglected. Their aim above all was the imitation of jade: half-molten masses of glass, of two or more colours, were worked up and dragged through one another; the glass was then carved into the old traditional forms. Objects of the native stone were thus imitated with the most marvellous accuracy. This was a process much resembling that adopted by the Alexandrian Greeks and the Romans for one class of their agate glass bodies; but the Chinese showed greater restraint in the blending of the colours, and were at greater pains to imitate closely the natural stones. As I have said, the forms taken by this glass follow those into which the Chinese had been wont from time immemorial to carve their jade, their agates, and their milky chalcedonies; but we may note that their carvings in rock crystal were not copied in glass. Besides the little tripod bowls and cups with archaic designs in relief, natural objects were imitated, fruits and flowers especially—the opening calix of the lotus, the ‘Buddha’s hand’ citron, or again the almond-shaped peach, symbol of long life.
We must now turn to the little glass snuff-bottles, in the decoration of which the Chinese carried their original methods to the highest perfection. We have indeed in these the only form of Chinese glass that has found any favour with European collectors.
The lid of these snuff-bottles is often of another material—metal, coral, or carved lac—and to it is attached the little ivory spoon with which the snuff is extracted. I may point out that little flasks of similar shape, made generally of porcelain, the yao-ping or medicine-bottles, have long been in use in China for pills, rare drugs, and eye-medicines. These yao-ping, whether for medicines or for snuff, were often carved out of various stones—the moss-agate and the red and white carnelian were special favourites—and it was above all these many-coloured varieties of the quartz family that were copied in glass, in the first place probably by the above-mentioned Hu. The infinite variety in the technique and in the decoration of these little flasks—this may be seen in any large collection, such as that formed by Mr. Salting[[278]]—is at first overwhelming, but most of them will fall under one or other of the following classes:—
1. Snuff-bottles imitating a natural stone, as amianthus, malachite, or chalcedony, formed by the simple interpenetration of masses of glass of different colours. Such bottles are generally not carved on the surface.
2. Those of the nature of an onyx, built up by the superposition of two or more layers of glass of different colours, the under surface being exposed in places by the carving away of the upper layers as in a cameo. We thus get a carnelian red or a deep blue design on a milky white ground. In other cases a jade-green passes by gradation through a pink layer to a pure white. Such an arrangement may be skilfully made use of to obtain a blend of colours on the petals of a lotus or other flower.
3. In this class the superficial colours do not enclose the whole core, but lie scattered on the surface. By this means green, red, blue, and yellow patches, all standing on the same level, may be made use of in the design. In such work we may see the climax of the Chinese technique in this genre, and the result has apparently been brought about by placing these patches of coloured paste on the sides of the mould before the introduction of the core of plain glass. Though this is technically a triumph of ingenuity, the flasks thus decorated are by no means the most beautiful of the series.
Besides these, many other methods of decoration may at times be found on these snuff-bottles; we see elaborate designs painted in enamel on the interior, showing through the transparent glass, or again an opaque paste resembling porcelain may be decorated with colours on the surface. Avanturine glass is probably of late introduction, but spangles (of reduced copper) are sometimes made to appear locally in the clear glass as a golden cloud.[[279]]
We know little of the source or of the composition of the glass used by the Chinese. Some of it was made in Pekin, but the province of Shantung seems to have long been the centre of the glass manufacture.[[280]] Here were made the little bricks of coloured glass (four inches by twelve and two inches in thickness)—the Po-li-chuan—which were sold to the glass-workers and enamellers in Pekin and elsewhere. These glass bricks were at one time imitated in Bohemia with the special object of supplying the Chinese markets—the imitations were known in the trade as pomana. As to the materials from which the native glass was made, there is little or no available information. We are told incidentally that it was compounded by fusing a certain rock with saltpetre.[[281]] This statement, and the fact of the use of imported ‘metal’ from Bohemia, make it probable that the glass belongs on the whole to the potash family. So again, the Chinese have long been acquainted with lead fluxes and enamels, and it was doubtless this experience that enabled them to command such a surprising range of colours in the glasses with which they built up their little snuff-bottles. We shall then probably not be wrong in regarding the glass of these bottles as of the potash-lead family.[[282]]
Finally, we may say of this Chinese glass that it can lay claim to a prominent and distinct place in any general history such as this, on the ground not only of the originality of its technique, but also because of the influence which, as I have already pointed out, it has had of late years upon the ‘new glass’ of France.
The position of Japan with regard to glass is a unique one. It is perhaps the only country that in past or present times has taken an important place in the world of art where the use of glass, whether for practical or æsthetic purposes, has remained almost absolutely unknown. I make this statement, of course, of the country as it was before the late revolution. Nowadays the art of glass-making, like other Western arts, is practised with some success, but without, I think, any original developments which would call for notice. The name they have for glass—bidoro—is evidently derived from the Spanish vidrio, or the Portuguese vidro. But the Japanese never appear to have taken even that sporadic interest in the material that they showed for other exotic productions that at times filtered in from the West.
What I have said applies to feudal and recent times. If, however, one goes back to the period that preceded the dawn of Japanese history, one finds that plain beads of clear glass, both blue and white, have been discovered in the dolmen tombs.[[283]] Examples of these beads may be seen in the Gowland collection in the British Museum. Again, in the famous Shoso In Treasury at Nara are two vessels of glass:—(1) a shallow bowl of transparent green glass, carved in relief with a design of fishes and water-plants; (2) a cup of white glass, carefully executed, the surface carved with a diaper pattern made up of shallow hexagonal hollows. There is no reason to doubt the well-authenticated record that these glass bowls were deposited with the rest of the collection by the Emperor Shomu in the year 756 of our era. There are in the same Shoso In, and in other Imperial collections among objects dating from this time, examples of metal ware and of silk brocade that show evidence of a Western Asiatic, probably Sassanian, origin. These and other objects that are undoubtedly of an exotic origin may perhaps many of them have been presents from the Chinese emperors on the occasion of embassies from Japan. It is certainly a fact that in the previous century the sons and retainers of the last Sassanian ruler of Persia had fled before the Arab invaders and taken refuge with the Chinese court, bringing with them such treasure as they had been able to save from the general wreck. This fact may give a hint as to the origin of the Shoso In glass. At any rate, in China at this period there is no evidence of any skill in glass-working.
CHAPTER XXII
CONTEMPORARY GLASS
The history of glass in the nineteenth century is mainly concerned with improvements in mechanical processes, by means of which it is now possible to turn out a perfectly clear white glass in large quantities at greatly reduced cost.
Meantime little heed has been given to the artistic merit of individual pieces. In fact, thanks in no small measure to one widely applied mechanical ‘improvement,’ the process namely of pressing into a mould, the highly trained skill of the glass-blower has been less and less called into play, so that now a complaint is heard, both in England and in France, of the difficulty of finding workmen thoroughly masters of the art. The last stage, indeed, in the decline of our English cut-glass was reached when ‘passable imitations’ of the facetted work were turned out by this ‘pressing’ process.
And yet from time to time attempts have been made on the one hand to give fresh life to old methods of work and schemes of decoration, on the other to develop the application of the material along new or previously little explored paths. Of what has been effected in Venice in the first of these directions something has already been said. In England, and we may add in Germany also (at Berlin, for instance, and at Ehrenfeld, near Cologne), these attempts have for the most part taken the direction of revivals, as when by the skilful use of the blowing-iron table-glass has been produced of graceful but rather fantastic outlines and with more or less reminiscence of Venetian prototypes. I need not dwell upon such efforts, as nothing in the way of a school has been founded. It is indeed noticeable that both in Germany and in England, in the case of the more expensive table-glass that we now see in the shop windows, the decoration, such as it is, has continued to be sought rather in processes of cutting and engraving on the old lines.
Various fantastic methods of surface decoration have indeed found favour at times. An artificial iridescence has been given to the surface by certain chemical agencies—perhaps the most elaborate instance of such decoration may be found in the ‘favrile’ glass of Messrs. Tiffany, the well-known goldsmiths of New York. But as a rule, the facility with which the desired result may be obtained at little expense by means of modern chemical and mechanical processes has led, in the case of glass, to that want of reticence and restraint and to that habit of resting content with the à peu près—the passable imitation—that are characteristic of so much of the modern art productions that fill the show-cases of exhibitions.
Somewhat greater interest may be found in certain applications of glass that have come to the front in France of recent years. Here at all events there is a public that takes some interest in the contemporary products of the decorative arts. In the yearly Salons, beside the pictures and the sculpture, these minor arts—jewellery, metal-work, fayence and glass—find a prominent place and a critical or enthusiastic public.
It is, however, only within the last few years that objects of glass have taken an important place among these exhibits, and that this is so is above all due to two men who, with considerable artistic talents, combine great energy and both scientific and technical knowledge—these are Émile Gallé and Henri Cros.
Already many years ago the art of enamelling on glass had been successfully revived in France—witness the reproduction of a Saracenic mosque lamp made by M. P. Brocard as far back as 1867.[[284]] But since that time glass, as a material capable of artistic applications, has been attacked upon new lines. When speaking of the glass of the Chinese, I have more than once pointed to the influence that the work of these people has apparently had upon certain new developments in France. Something of the sort—in the way, I mean, of treating glass as if it were a stone of varied colours, carnelian or onyx—was indeed attempted here in England as long ago as 1878, in the case of the cameo glass of Webb of Stourbridge. Contemporary with him, Eugène Rousseau was working in France with his verres doublés et triplés.
But these strange new methods of treating glass are above all associated with Émile Gallé, who at Nancy (where he was born in 1846) has built up something like a school. The material was attacked by him, as it were from every side. Advantage was taken of the facility with which, by means of powerful machinery, glass can now be rapidly cut into any desired shape. As in the case of the decoration of the modern porcelain of Sèvres and other places, a source of more than one heat-resisting colour has been found in chromium, and even such rare elements as thallium and iridium have been experimented with. By the skilful application of reducing and oxidising flames, local variations of colour are brought about, and (in this unconsciously following the Indian glass that I spoke of in the last chapter) the possibilities of artistic effect to be found in the presence of numberless minute bubbles have not been neglected. The Chinese have been surpassed in the strange pitted forms—in some cases recalling cork or other kinds of bark—that the surface of the glass has been made to assume. But above all, in the varied markings, in the mouchetage and the arborescent forms, that loom out from the interior of the glassy mass, M. Gallé has outdistanced all his predecessors. Lately he has introduced pieces of metallic foil, or again crystalline masses of amianthus or mica, into the body of his glass; or again insects, realistically rendered in enamel—dragon-flies are a great favourite—are seen caught up within the mass.
Both Gallé and others have made frequent use of an incrustation process by which fragments of glass are worked into the surface of a soft paste—but this was a means of decoration known in Egypt in the days of the Ptolemies. Endless gradations of colour are obtained by laying or ‘soldering on’ successive thin layers of glass until the desired effect is obtained. To some such process are also due, it would seem, the delicate shades seen in the Tiffany glass. Finally, by the use of rapidly revolving boring-tools—some of them worked on a vertical axis—the hardest Bohemian glass may be quickly brought to the desired form.
Apart from the yearly exhibitions, examples of the glass of the Nancy school may be seen in Paris at the Luxembourg and at the École des Arts et Métiers. It cannot, however, be said that the general effect of this glass is, as a rule, either brilliant or decorative.
M. Gallé himself is something of a poet—of the symboliste school, I should judge. What it is that he aims at expressing by means of this often sombre glass cannot indeed be better presented than in his own words:—‘Mist and dews half shroud and half reveal the fine veinings and splashings in a grey jade-crystal vase. A thick flushing of rose-tinted glass is carved into a chimera-like flower, half influorescent, half smiling, half weary, half orchid, half pansy. A beetle drags its slow length over the rust of the lichens. Side by side with flesh-tints and carnations we see bold touches of coral pink. A pale gleam steals through the dull maze of iridium. Vegetable shadows grin at us. Phantoms of bloom are dimly seen. A fossil shell engraved beneath the fragile work contains the glass-worker’s signature.’—(Quoted by H. Frantz, Magazine of Art, vol. xx. p. 269.)
Of quite another nature is the pâte de verre, a substance somewhat of the nature of a glass frit, which has been made use of by the French sculptor, M. Henri Cros, in the modelling of polychrome reliefs and friezes. I say ‘modelling,’ for this strange material can apparently be worked like wax or plaster at one stage of its preparation. When cold it is of so tough a nature that a nail may be driven into it. At the entrance of the new hall of Sculpture at the Luxembourg may be seen a relief of this pâte de verre forming the back of a fountain. As a material it lies perhaps a little remote from the class of objects with which we have been occupied in this book. I mention it here as an example of the success which in France of late years has attended the attempt to take advantage of the new appliances and materials that, thanks to recent scientific discoveries, lie at the command of the artist and craftsman. Here, as in the case of the potter’s art, not only have old-world processes—those of the Far East above all—been revived, but a constant endeavour is being made to strike out in new directions.