THE “MODERN ANTIQUE”
Much of the glass sold in the smaller curio-shops as “antique” was not made to deceive: it is the offering of it in such places which intends fraud. Most English-made reproductions of old glass in shape and cutting were not intended by the manufacturer to delude a collector, but to attract the ordinary buyer for table use or decorative use; one who is not a collector but “likes something that looks old-fashioned,” as he says.
Pawnbrokers’ and jewellers’ shops are stocked with what is called in the trade “the modern antique”; other examples of this are the cheap, hasty, and obvious copies of miniatures of famous beauties set in new paste frames and sold for a few shillings. In pawnshops and ordinary glass-shop windows a collector sees spiral-stem wine glasses made for modern use and not intended to deceive; they are a kind of tawdrily ornamental hock glass, embodying some modern designer’s idea of what is beautiful; they correspond with no antique shape of bowl, the stems are very thin and fragile, the feet are as small as or smaller than the rim of the bowl, and the spirals are parti-coloured and “tight.” No collector need be taken in by such as these—they were not made to take him in, they are ordinary articles of modern manufacture and daily commerce.
So are the white glass bowls, tazzas, centre-pieces, vases, “specimen glasses,” etc., elaborately cut, perhaps engraved also, and meant for modern tables and mantelpieces. These are copies of the fine old ware simply because the old ware affords good models, and the information given in chapter ii of this book will enable a collector to recognize the modernity of these honest imitations, even when they are found (as they often are) in a shop supposed to purvey antiques.