Collecting Old Glass, English and Irish

by Sir J. H. Yoxall

So that now, with both tint and sound to guide us, we need not be taken in by modern copies or old Dutch glass.

3. THE QUALITY OF OLD GLASS METAL

EXAMPLE OF FINE QUALITY; SHOWING THE BUTTERFLY AND THE COTTON-WHITE WREATHING AROUND THE CENTRAL TUBE

Italians and Frenchmen came to England in the sixteenth century to teach the art and mystery of glass-making to our islanders; yet neither old Italian nor French glass metal has the quality of old English and Irish glass metal. The glassware made here between the reigns of Queen Anne and Queen Victoria had the best quality of any glass ever made in the world. But what is quality in this connexion? It means material, but it also means the manipulation of material and the effect produced. The glass made during the reigns of the four Georges was called “flint glass” and “lead glass”—misnomers, perhaps, but I need not take up space here in discussing that; the important point is that the quality of the metal and the skill of the manipulation resulted in thinness, rigidity, shapeliness, a velvety surface, dark sheen, brilliancy, radiancy of facets when cut, and the vibrant, musical ring of the eighteenth-century glass. Glass made under Charles II was not so dark, and Victorian glass was whiter; Victorian and modern English glass is of excellent quality, but is uniform to almost a painful degree. It lacks character and diversity; the Georgian glass was individual and original, so to speak. There were faults in it—little air-blobs, or vesicles, that feel like pimples on the surface, or show as bubbles within it; striations, like lines of fibre, also; and deviations from the strict mathematic line or curve, which were due to hand-work. But if you examine contemporary Dutch-made, French-made, or Italian-made glass, you notice that the same defects exist, and more numerously, while there is a flimsiness, or a lumpiness, or a smeary look and harsh feel which are absent from old English and Irish glass.

A specked, pimply surface, and a dull thickness and clumsy lumpiness or flashy thin lightness, are found in old Dutch-made glass; and this, taken in conjunction with the absence of true ring, enables a collector to reject the old ware sent over from Holland. The quality of the English and Irish glass metal comes out in the surface, too, a little; the fingers feel the surface of an old blown wine glass to be cool, smooth, hard, and yet velvety; while the surface of Waterford cut-glass has a silky feel.

4. THE WEIGHT OF OLD GLASS

In his privately circulated book on “English Baluster Stemmed Glasses of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” Mr. Francis Buckley aptly says that “English-made glasses of the first period were all light in weight and cloudy in appearance. Some time between the Restoration and the end of the seventeenth century, but when precisely it is difficult to say, the English glass-makers began to try experiments with a view to removing from their glasses this dull and cloudy appearance. Their object was to produce a substance like crystal; and this object they eventually achieved by introducing into their metal a large quantity of lead.” This gave the characteristic weight.

The old Dutch glass seems light in weight, even when it is thick; old English and Irish glass seems relatively heavy even when it is thin. Waterford glass is especially heavy. These differences in weight are probably due to differences in the materials used for mixing the metal; but whatever the cause, they aid the collector to know the real from the counterfeit, and the old English from the Dutch. Even the thick, clumsy glasses made here in the reign of William and Mary seem more weighty than those otherwise exactly similar which were then brought over from Holland.