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.
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