CUSTARD GLASSES
The most desirable custard glasses have handles. Some of them have square bases. Some of them resemble smallish wine glasses with corrugated stems. Most of them are decorated by pressed or incised lines.
(1) HANDLED, AND (2) SQUARED-BASED CUSTARD GLASSES
XVI. SALT CELLARS, PEPPER BOXES, SUGAR BASINS, ETC.
The “Sunderland” salt cellars have already been mentioned (see [page 39]); moulded or cut-glass salt cellars are much less rare. The oldest of these seem to be those with oval bowls, in the Queen Anne silver style, with diamond-shape bases on short stems, everywhere cut. Some salt cellars have turned-over tops, much broader than the rest of the vessel; there are Bristol striped salt cellars of this shape. In some cut salt cellars the lines run horizontally. Victorian salt cellars were very heavy and rather plain.
Pepper boxes of glass are round, or octagonal, plain or cut, with or without a foot; holes are pierced in the top, there is a glass stopper at the bottom; sometimes the base is square and the pierced top is of silver. In some cases the vessel was used for castor-sugar.
Sugar-basins exist in numbers, and in plain, cut, opal, and coloured glass, notably in the Bristol blue. There are covered sugar basins; when these are large and cut they are known as sugar bowls. A special type is the caddy sugar-basin (see [page 27]); this was usually of straight-sided form, blown, moulded, or cut, or both moulded and cut; it stood in the central receptacle of a tea-caddy, within the round hole between the two rectangular boxes which held green tea and black tea respectively. These basins are much more seldom met with than the caddies are. Often they are very heavy, and nearly always they are very ornamental. Bristol opal-glass sugar and slop basins are met with; in this glass complete tea-sets were made, including tea poys or glass tea-caddies. In the Willett collection was “a Bristol glass teapot and cover, with flowers in colours.” A glass teapot is rarely found.
XVII. MIRRORS, GLASS PICTURES, GLASS KNOBS
Mirrors more properly come within the category of furniture, but they largely consist of glass, of course, so that some notice of them is needed here.
In 1688 the art of casting large plates of glass began to be carried on in France. In 1663 the art had been patented in England, but for smaller sizes. One French mirror, now in the Louvre at Paris, was valued at £6000 in 1791. Glass used to be a costly product; the chief reason why old prints are usually found trimmed of their margins was that glass to frame with them was so dear.
Old mirrors with bevelled edges have the bevel flattish, nearly in the plane of the glass; the bevel follows the shape of the frame, but is irregular at its inner outlines, because the grinding of the bevel was done by hand. Modern bevels, done by machinery, are almost mathematically exact, and make an acuter angle with the frame than the old bevels do. Also the silvering at the back of old mirrors differs from the method of silvering now used; the difference is much more easy to recognize by the eye than to describe, but there is a kind of granulation in the older backing.
Glass pictures are of two kinds; one in which the painting, in oil-colours, was done upon the glass itself, usually at the back of it; and another in which the paint was laid on coarsely behind a print which, rubbed very thin at the back of the paper, had been affixed to the back of the glass. This second kind is the more numerously met with; also it is the most counterfeited. Age may be known, however, by the curving, bubbly surface of the glass. A third kind, consisting of a mosaic of bits of glass, so laid together in cement as to form a picture is rare, even in modern examples.
Glass knobs to handsome sideboards were used in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and have continually been used in Yorkshire, for dressers, since then; old glass knobs are usually moulded, but some are cut, though the round, uncut shape was the most convenient for handling. Glass door-knobs are found.