Less rare, but rare, are the wine glasses with red and white or blue and white spirals in the stems which were made at Bristol; if the white is not cotton-white but greyish, however, such a glass is probably old Dutch.
BRISTOL COLOURED GLASS PEPPER BOX, SHOWING THE ELABORATE FLOWERS, SUCH AS ARE SEEN IN PAPER-WEIGHTS
Fine tableware of transparent blue, blue-green, red, and purple was made at Bristol; the blue is a peculiar, unique blue, imitated but never well reproduced; where the glass is thick, it, held to the light, shows a Royal purple, and where thin it is almost a sea-blue. Egg-cups of this ware are handsome. Bristol red glass is of a ruby hue, with not so much vermilion in it as in Bohemian glass: there is also “cherry-red” glass. Bristol blue and red glass was sometimes touched with gilt, in lettering and lines; this did not wear well except when embossed.
Bristol produced the finest glass paper-weights—of a size and shape to fill the palm of one’s hand if only the wrist and finger-tips are touching the paper—and at the base of these you see flowers of coloured glass, bright and various in hue, and rendered with wonderful skill; of the same kind of mosaic or tessellated glass is a small pepper pot in my possession, a very rare example. Other Bristol paper-weights, larger, and door-stops, still larger and heavier, were tall ovals, two or three or four times the size of a goose’s egg and rather resembling one in shape; the colour is a verdant or a sage green, and the inner decoration is flower-petals and leaves, pearled over as if by dew, and blown with extraordinary skill.
BRISTOL COLOURED PAPER-WEIGHTS (1) GREEN; (2) COLOURED SPIRALS
Collectors should beware of forgeries of parti-coloured paper-weights. They may be known by the coarseness of the flowers inside the glass, the lack of fine workmanship, and the tawdriness of the colours.
“BRISTOL” AND “NAILSEA”
Nailsea is a small place near Bristol, and nobody can now be sure from which of the two came any particular bauble—coloured glass-flask, pestle, bell, witch-ball, tobacco pipe, trumpet, jug, rolling-pin, bellows-shaped article, walking-stick or rapier, or the (excessively rare) long glass cylinders containing coloured glass counters for games. But it is thought that the Bristol wares of this kind were brighter in colour than the Nailsea product, which, because less skilful and daring, perhaps, was cooler in tint, less striking in mixture of colours, and therefore more refined. Probably Bristol produced the glass which is ornamented by alternate broad stripes of red and opal-white. Perhaps Nailsea was responsible for glass of a “greenery-yallery” hue containing whitish spots or splashes: there are many forgeries of jugs and rolling-pins, in this style, about.