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.