PASTE
All artificial “stones” used in jewellery are glass—glass variously shaped, cut, and coloured—but “old paste” is glass not coloured; though it may be backed with coloured foil, which shows a tint through the glass. Old-paste collecting is, therefore, a branch of old-glass collecting, and cannot be ignored in this book.
White paste is usually a substitute for diamonds; the carefully made and cut old paste or strass (the French name for it, adopted under Louis V, when the best paste was made) came very near the look of diamonds. Paste or strass is glass of a very hard, bright kind, cut in the way in which diamonds are cut, and mounted in the metals and styles which usually go with diamond jewellery.
Behind these brilliant bits of cut-glass, silver or tinfoil was put, so that light falling through the glass should be refracted and reflected back, as it is in natural crystals such as diamonds. Time affects the colour of this foil and thus gives a softer beauty to the effect. Old paste is more beautiful than new paste for another reason, too—being old glass it has the tints of old glass so often referred to in this book. Some paste seems to have been made at Bristol, for “Bristows” or “Bristol diamonds” some of it is called.
The older paste ornaments have the bits of glass set separately, each setting for each bit separate though touching each other, and therefore there is much metal shown in the settings; this applies to the seventeenth-century paste. Later, near the end of the eighteenth century and afterwards, as now, the bits of glass were sunk within a continuous grooved or hollow setting, each bit held in place by a small claw or raised clip of metal soldered on to the general groove. The setting for white paste was usually silver: coloured pastes were often set in gold, silver gilt, pinchbeck, bronze, and sometimes in pewter.
Paste consisting of very small pieces is preferable to the larger varieties. “Diamond” paste is oftener found than “emerald,” “ruby,” or “sapphire” paste. A certain form of paste (not truly paste) is found in jewellery set with glass cut and silvered at the back, as if it were a bit of looking-glass.
A test for the age of paste is the presence of scratches on its surface, and of dimness brought about by chemical action of the air. The scratches are oftenest found at the edges and flats of the facets.