Collecting Old Glass, English and Irish

by Sir J. H. Yoxall

5. THE SIGNS OF USE AND WEAR

Many fantastic pieces of old glass were made as curiosities or ornaments, but most old glass was made for use. Glass is easily scratched; as the wine glasses and decanters were set down upon the hard, polished mahogany of dinner-tables, after the cloth was drawn, and were moved, the feet of the wine glasses and the bases of the decanters become scratched thereby. Lustre-ornaments, glass candlesticks, or glass vases which stood upon marble or hard wood mantelpieces, being moved when maidservants were dusting, became scratched at the base. The collector will therefore carefully examine those parts of a piece of glass which, if it is old, may be expected to show the signs of use and wear caused by contact and movement upon hard surfaces; it is well to do this by the aid of a pocket-lens—which ought to be a glass collector’s constant companion.

In a genuine old piece the scratches are numerous, do not all run the same way, and are dust-coloured, more or less. Most counterfeits show no scratches at all, but the more elaborate forgeries show artificial scratches; these usually run all one way, however, or seem all to have been made together at the same time, and sometimes these artificial scratchings appear in parts of the glass which would not be exposed to marking of the kind when in use, as, for instance, inside the bowls.

Yet it is not wise to condemn and refuse as a fraud a piece of glass which shows the other four or five general evidences of genuineness simply because only slight scratching is evident; for the glass may have been standing in a cupboard unused for many years, its nose put out of joint by some change of fashion in table-ware soon after it had been bought, and have passed into a collector’s cabinet before coming into your hands for examination. Nor is it safe to suppose that the more the scratches the older the piece; it may have had more than the common amount of usage. If the glass has a “folded foot” or a “ring-base” to stand on, the scratches will be at the very edge of the foot, or on the ring, just where it touched the table or mantelpiece, and there only.

6. THE PONTIL-MARK

I mention this last because it does not apply to all old glass; it does not apply to glass that was cast or moulded, but it applies to all old blown glass, and is a very important test and guide indeed.

UNDER-SIDE OF WINE GLASS FOOT, SHOWING THE PONTIL-MARK AND THE HEMMED OR “FOLDED FOOT” EDGE

The pontil-mark is either a depression in the glass, shallow, about the size of the third finger-end, or a lump about that size, standing up from the level of the glass around it. The pontil-mark indicates first that the piece of glass was originally blown, and second that before removing the blow-pipe the workman, as usual, attached the blown glass to a pontil. The pontil or punt is an iron rod, joined to the vessel by a little melted glass while the vessel is still hot. When the time comes for taking away the pontil, it is done by contact with cold water, which causes the glass to contract around the pontil-end and the pontil to become detached. Glass vessels which were blown, only, show the depression or the lump accordingly: blown-glass vessels which were afterwards “cut” show it in part only, or not at all, if the glass-cutter removed it: vessels neither blown nor cut, but cast in a mould, do not show it because they never had it. In the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, glass moulding seldom took place; so that the presence of the pontil-mark, whether it be a hollow or a lump, usually indicates age in the vessel which shows it.

In the oldest glass the pontil-hole is flaked with something which rather resembles mica. In the oldest wine glasses the pontil-lump stands out knobbily. In every case there are signs of the local fracture. As a rule, the older the glass the bigger and rougher the pontil-mark.