James Tassie (born 1735), the Glasgow stonemason, applied the experience he had gained in the modelling of portrait heads in wax to the reproduction of antique gems in coloured pastes. The bright colours of these compare unfavourably with the delicate hues of the glass intaglios that have come down from classical times. But Tassie, both James and his nephew William, also made portrait medallions of a comparatively large size, using a nearly opaque glass paste or frit, more or less resembling porcelain. This paste was formed, it is said, of ‘a finely powdered glass and finely powdered pigments, annealed by being placed in a reverbatory furnace.’ This is a substance of some interest to us, and we may perhaps find in it points of resemblance to the ‘pâte de verre’ employed lately by M. Henri Cros (see [Chap. XXII.]).
I can only mention one other local variety of glass. In Ireland, towards the end of the eighteenth century, more than one attempt was made to encourage the manufacture. Some large fruit-dishes of heavy cut-glass, and others in the form of open baskets adorned with festoons, have been traced back to glass-houses established at Waterford about the year 1780. This glass is distinguished by a more or less faint blue tinge derived from a minute quantity of cobalt in the ‘metal.’ The gilding that was largely applied to these vessels was burned in by means of borax, and where the gold has come away the surface of the glass is rough and pitted.
CHAPTER XXI
THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY GLASS OF PERSIA, INDIA, AND CHINA
I shall now devote a short chapter to the glass made in Asia, that is to say in Persia, in India, and in China, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This later Asiatic glass, though so thoroughly Oriental in character, can as a whole scarcely be regarded as a product of strictly indigenous growth, for in nearly all cases the technique of the manufacture, in some indeed the materials and even the ‘metal’ itself, can be traced back to Europe. It is for this reason that I have reserved its treatment to this late stage.
We are fortunate in possessing in the Oriental galleries at South Kensington, as well as in the British Museum, a comparatively rich series of examples of this later Oriental glass, not a few of them of great beauty and interest. As a class it can probably be studied nowhere so well as in London.
The Chinese glass of the eighteenth century is above all of interest to us, for upon it more than upon anything else is based the only new departure in the treatment of the material that the nineteenth century can lay claim to—the ‘New Glass,’ I mean, that has taken so important a place of late among the minor art products of France. It is therefore not altogether illogical that this glass of the Far East should find a place in our history between the English glass of the eighteenth century and that now being made in France.
The glorious enamelled glass of the Saracens, of which I have given some account in a former chapter, was already a thing of the past before the end of the fifteenth century. This was at least the case in Syria and Egypt, where alone the art as we know it had flourished. I have attributed this sudden decline, as regards the first country, to the invasion of Timur early in the century. On this occasion a whole army of craftsmen was transferred, it is said, from Damascus to Timur’s new capital at Samarkand. In Egypt the narrow-minded fanaticism of the later Memlûk Sultans and the troubles that preceded the Turkish conquest were doubtless factors in the artistic decline. As far as the Mohammedan East is concerned, there is thus an obscure period in our history extending to the end of the sixteenth century for which there is little or nothing to show. Glass of some sort doubtless continued to be made in Syria, and perhaps in Egypt, but little that is distinctive or of artistic interest was produced.
When we again come upon specimens of Oriental glass, it is no longer in the Mediterranean countries but in Persia, and to a less extent in Northern India, that we find them. Not only so, but the glass that we now have to deal with is of an entirely different character. With a few rare exceptions, the thick jewel-like enamels of the Syro-Egyptian school are now as much a thing of the past as the carved glass of a still earlier time.