The Glass Circle Journal No.8

•

THE GLASS CIRCLE

JOURNAL

L I G

VOLUME

EIGHT

THE GLASS CIRCLE

Founded by John Maunsell Bacon 1937

President, 1957 — 1994

Robert J Charleston

Honorary Vice-Presidents
Paul Perrot, Hugh Tait and

Dwight Lanmon

Honorary Secretary

Jo Marshall

Honorary Treasurer

Derek Woolston
Chairman

Simon Cottle

Committee
Kate Crowe

Wendy Evans

Henry Fox

Dr Jonathan Kersley

Barbara Morris
Anne Towse

Dr David C Watts

Aims and Membership
The Glass Circle promotes the study, understanding and appreciation of historic, artistic and

collectable glass in all its aspects for the benefit of both experts and beginners by means of
publications and by convivial meetings, lectures, outings and other events. Membership is

open to anyone interested in glass, including dealers and other professionals, at home and

abroad. The possession of a collection is not necessary although many members are keen
collectors.

Because some meetings and visits offer the opportunity to handle rare and expensive glass,
new applicants must be sponsored by existing members; the Committee is always willing to

arrange informal meetings and make the necessary arrangements to bring this about.

Activities
Regular meetings in London on a wide variety of topics, sometimes with speakers from

abroad, are held in October, November, December, February, March, April, May and June.

The Annual Outing to a place of glass interest is held in the Autumn, often enabling members
to inspect collections not available to the general public. For this event there is a charge for

transport and meals. The Glass Circle’s long-established excellent relationship with the

museums, major auction houses and many dealers in London occasionally extends to private
receptions or social events. The Circle also produces
a
series of publications, regular and

occasional, and possesses a Library open without charge (but by appointment only) to

members.

Application for Membership
Further information and application forms for membership can be obtained
from the

Hon. Treasurer

Mr. D C Woolston
31 Pitfield Drive
Meopham

Kent DA13 OAY

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Contents

Memories of Robert J Charleston

Jacobite Drinking Clubs

by Muriel Steevenson

III The Crystal Chandelier from the King’s

Audience Chamber (now the Privy Chamber)

Hampton Court Palace

by Martin Mortimer

IV Masonic Glass in England

by Dr David Stuart

The Falcon Brick Cone Glass House

The Other Revolution of 1688

by Roy G Bendrey

VI Felix Slade

A collector in uncharted waters, 1790
—
1868

by Hugh Tait

VII British Studio Glass

by Peter Layton

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL
EDITORIAL SUB-COMMITTEE

Kate Crowe

Simon Cottle
Dr Jonathan Kersiey

ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER

John S M Scott

DESIGNER

Ned Garland

()The Glass Circle Journal

Cover Illustration: A Large
English Baluster

Goblet circa 1710,1 I inches in height

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Robert Jesse Charleston,
FSA, FSGT

1916— 1994

This edition is dedicated to Robert J Charleston
President of The Glass Circle from

1957 — 1994

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL 8

MEMORIES OF

ROBERT J CHARLESTON
One of the great experts of glass, we include some reminiscences of Robert by former
colleagues, friends and current members of The Glass Circle who knew him well.

ROBERT J CHARLESTON 1916-1994
An Appreciation by Janet Benson

Members will have been greatly saddened by the

news in December 1994 of the death of Robert

Charleston, President of the Circle since 1957. His

scholarship and personality have strongly influenced
the Circle for longer than most of us can remember;
our debt to him is immeasurable.

It was in 1947 that our first President, W A Thorpe;

(with whom Robert had been in touch, as he described
in a characteristic understatement, ‘as a result of my

interest in Islamic glass’) introduced a rather diffident
Robert to what was then the ‘Circle of Glass

Collectors’. He was working at the Bristol Museum and

was soon to move to the Department of Ceramics at
the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he pursued an

outstanding career until his retirement in 1976.
In 1949 he read his first paper to the Glass Circle on
The Islamic Contribution to the Arts of Glass.
This was

the start of Robert’s prodigious contribution to Glass
Circle meetings — at least 14 lectures were delivered

and circulated over the next two decades — as he
researched beyond ancient Islamic and Roman glass to

many aspects of English glass.

Robert succeeded W A Thorpe as President in 1957.

During the next 30 years membership trebled in size –

with many overseas members — as did attendance at
meetings, so no longer could we meet
in the
intimacy

of members’ homes. The interests of the Circle were
extended far beyond the traditional topics of English
and Scottish 17th and 18th century table glass. Robert
presided over almost every meeting with gentle

courtesy, always able to draw on his retentive memory
to comment on the topic under consideration.

We were fortunate indeed to be graced by a scholar of
such international distinction, whose work in glass and

ceramics encompassed writing and editing — both
books and articles — cataloguing, lecturing and
translating.

1972 saw the introduction of the occasional journal

The Glass Circle.
Early volumes were edited by Robert

with the cover imaginatively designed by his wife, Joan,
and each edition contained substantial contributions
based on papers he had read to the Circle.
In 1986 Robert felt that he must step down as

President. This was partly because he now lived in

Gloucestershire; Joan had unexpectedly inherited

Whittington Court, a 16th century manor house with

adjoining village, much in need of restoration. It was
to this that they devoted their time and energies in
retirement. The Circle created a new post of Chairman,

who would bear the burden of chairing meetings and
committees, and Robert was persuaded to continue as
Hon. President. On the occasion of our Golden Jubilee

we presented Joan and Robert with a goblet engraved
by Peter Dreiser and depicting Whittington Court,

where the summer outing was welcomed in September
1988. He read his last paper to the Circle the same year

on
‘Flashed Glass—An English “First”?’
and our final

memories are when he and Joan joined members for

lunch during the summer outing of September 1993.

For many of us it is difficult to imagine the Circle

without Robert’s direction, his encyclopaedic
knowledge, his clear intellect, his extensive network of
contacts, and above all, the kindness which he and

Joan extended to all members — particularly those new

to the Circle.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

HOMAGE TO ROBERT J CHARLESTON
by Paul Hollister

Glass and ceramic historian Robert J Charleston

died on December 4, 1994 at the age of 78. He is
perhaps most significantly known for his definitive

book of 1984,
English Glass and the Glass Used in

England, circa 400-1940,
but equally broadly for his

scores of articles and papers appearing from about
1940 on many of the most varied and intriguing

aspects of glass history, its unexplored areas and cross-
currents. He ranged across glass history and literature

in
a predatory
way. Charleston was also the author of

Roman Pottery (1955)
and the editor of

World

Ceramics (1968),
to which he contributed several

sections. He translated from Danish and French a book
on Vincennes and Sevres porcelains. With Madelaine

Marcheix and Michael Archer he catalogued the glass

and enamels of the James A de Rothschild Collection at
Waddesdon Manor (1977).

Robert Charleston was born into a family of teachers

in Upsala, Sweden. His father, a professor of English at

the University, had written the English summary to
Herbert Seitz’s
Aldre SvenskaGlas med Graverad Dekor

(Old Swedish Engraved Glass, a study of 17th century

production;
1936), and Robert worked at Nordiska

Museum in Stockholm in 1938. After World War II he

joined the Bristol Museum in 1947, and entered the
Department of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert
Museum the next year, serving as Keeper of Ceramics

(and Glass) 1963-1976. His myriad publications began

about 1939, when he was only 23.

In 1964, I applied to the V&A to see and examine a

sample case of mid-19th century Venetian millefiori

canes and mosaic portraits. At the far end of the Glass

Gallery I ascended in an archaic cage elevator, and as it
emerged onto the top floor the man I had come to see,
Robert Charleston, was standing back, arms spread

wide, and smiling. He said ‘What can I do for you?’ I
have always remembered that moment thirty years ago

because it typified the man…right there and ready to

help whoever came along.

Years ago I began to notice that Robert Charleston

turned up in nearly every glass bibliography. His

Scandinavian, multi-lingual background and
education at New College, Oxford, had provided him

with the means to research among primary sources in
various languages, which in turn must have
encouraged the spread of his glass interests, especially

towards ‘aspects of glass which have always jumped out

at me as subjects which have never been adequately

handled in the literature
(e.g.
the relationship of glass

engraving to hardstone engraving, or
the
imitation of

porcelain in glass, etc.). I must say I should have liked

to have been a fly on the the wall observing both the

teacher and the taught.’ This in a letter Robert wrote to

me in 1985.1 have kept and treasured Robert
Charleston’s many letters from the 70s on, and it is

upon these that I rely for this little
hornmage
to the

most versatile glass historian.

The mingling of scrupulous honesty with humour

was typical of the man. For example, in a letter of 1980

Robert refers to a book in Portuguese and a Union of

South Africa archaeological survey concerning the
importation of Venetian beads into Mozambique at

the turn of the 15th-16th centuries, and adds: ‘To
be

honest I do not know where I picked these two

references up… The fact that I did not note page

numbers makes me think I had them second-hand

(thus offending against a capital rule of research, in the

breach I think I shall probably have your company).’

Robert gently criticised one well-known curator and

mutual friend with ‘Yes, he has cleared away a lot, the

undergrowth, but… I thought he was in some danger
of throwing out the baby with the bath-water. Some of

these glasses must be genuine, or there would be
nothing for the fakers to fake.’ Elsewhere he writes,
`I am delighted that your informed eye picked out the

appropriate reliquary. It is interesting what one sees

and what one does not see.’ But then, referring to
millefiori balls, he comes down on me with, ‘Why do I

have to insist on these spheres being for something?

Why should they not be curiosities of glass-making?’

To probe further, Robert asked the expert on Anglo-

Saxon antiquities, Vera Evison about the use of

mounted crystal balls, who replied that they were

mainly for decorative purposes but did not specify.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Robert confessed that he sometimes spent an hour

looking for the source of a particular fact ‘which I
thought I had at my finger-tips. Since there are over

300 notes in one of the chapters [in his book
English

Glass]
if I ever do finish this book the remuneration

will work out less than Joan [Mrs Charleston] would
pay someone to do a bit of dusting.’ The publisher

requested him to cut about 30% of the text. ‘Actually,

half a day at cutting is about as much as I can stand, so
I do it in the morning and devote the afternoon to

other things. This means mainly catching up on areas

or archaeological reports.’ Charleston would be under
pressure from archaeologists to finish. ‘When I have

finally produced a report, it normally disappears into

limbo for an unspecified number of months or years
before publication.’ Robert wrote the section on

archaeological glass in
Excavations at Southampton

1953
–
1969 (1975);
for glass excavated in London, and

the soon-to-be-published glass found at Henry VIII’s
Palace of Nonsuch.

In discussing the problems of cataloguing — in this

case Venetian glass — Robert wrote that ‘You cannot
normally get the objects in logical order, and stick to

one thing at a time … usually, it is a question of an
enamelled piece, and an 18th century coffee cup, five
miscellaneous Venetian or
facon de Venise
pieces, three

with
Lattimo
stripes, and a French container for

birdseed.’

In addition to cataloguing, to writing books,

technical papers and articles, Charleston was under

constant pressure to lecture — for example — a four-
lecture series on Islamic glass for a Sotheby course

on Islamic arts and crafts. ‘Fortunately, they want to
repeat the course in the autumn. In my experience,

lectures really only begin to pay off when you have

given them two or three times. After the umpteenth

and most profitable delivery they begin to go rotten in
the centre and one has to do something about it with
an infusion of new ideas, new slides, or any other

health-giving new output.’
Robert’s concern for the logic of details is evident

from the following. When we corresponded about

filigrana cane twists he wrote: ‘In the days when I
dabbled in textiles, it was a fad to specify in a woven
cloth which way the warps were twisted and which

way the wefts… I too always asked the question: what

if the spinner was left-handed? I suppose that you twist

the canes the way the gaffer tells you and if you are left-
handed you get used to it.’ He took with a grain of salt

a claim I had read that the Mosaic Studio in Rome

produced tens of thousands of shades of coloured

mosaics, including 1,000 shades of gold. ‘Can it

perhaps be that they cannot hit the same shade exactly

twice running? There is nothing like making a virtue
out of necessity.’

Robert Charleston often had to undertake

translations. I had recently acquired Vincezo Zanetti’s

1866
Guida di Murano (Guide to Murano and its

famous Glassworks).
Robert writes: ‘I envy you the 1866

Zanetti… It is very useful to know what Zanetti

thought he knew so long ago. I learned such Italian

as I know by the painful process of hacking my way
through the jungles of books like that, where the

general landmarks are familiar and some of the

technical terms are more of a guide than a hindrance.

It is all the little words like “but” and “if’ that trip one

up. After a certain time I did have recourse to
Teach

Yourself
books and became a little more systematic.’

We often corresponded about the problem of

establishing a chronology for millefiori that would fill

in the gaps, what Robert referred to as the ‘little tricks
of glassmaking [that] seem to run underground,

emerging at long intervals in unexpected places (e.g.

opaque-twists in objects which seem to be datable to
the early years of the 18th century).’ Chevron beads

were another problem. Robert writes: ‘I have long
given up worrying whether chevron beads might have

been made in Egypt. They were apparently found in

ancient buildings there, but it was pointed out that the
French stabled their mules in the buildings in the early

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

19th century, and that the beads might very well have
formed part of the harness, as is so often done in those

parts of the world. I have never come across a single
example which had a proved origin earlier than 1500

The vast majority of them were made at Murano (or in
the dependencies thereof at e.g. Amsterdam) in the
renaissance period.’ Very large chevrons are thought to

have been used to hold down blankets or other gear in

the Sahara.

Robert had little tolerance for stupidity. ‘That

dotty … woman … who proposed that all Hedwig

glasses were engraved in the workshop of Friedrich

Winter at the end of the 17th century. I do not know

what she is going to make of the fact that two
fragments have recently been found in South Germany

in an archaeological context apparently of medieval

date. The relationship of the iconography of the
Hedwig glass to that of the relief-cut Islamic glasses of

the 9th and 11th centuries is so close that there must

be some connection.’

Whatever the subject that intrigued him — whether

it was early equipment of wheel-engraving and

cutting, the trade in glass cakes as the raw material of

commerce, or ‘Souvenirs of the Grand Tour’ — he

got to the very bottom of it and — to use a mixed
metaphor — nailed it to the wall.

Our minds have been prised open and our lives

enriched by the labours of Robert Charleston –
performed out of compulsion and necessity, but for

our sake.

THE GLASS CFRCLE JOURNAL

ENCOUNTERS WITH R J
CHARLESTON

by David C Watts

My entry into glass collecting came through an

unexpected discovery when passing through

Beaminster, in Dorset. Sitting in the middle of an

antique shop window was an opaque twist cordial,
considered by many as the epitome of 18th century

glass. Its fascination led Rosemary and myself to
commit what we could afford of our family resources

to a glass collection, ultimately with the emphasis on
cut stems and eventually, to join the Glass Circle.

Lacking a sponsor member the accepted routine was

to take a few of our glasses along to Mr Charleston at
the V&A Museum for comment and approval. It was a

daunting moment, which made one feel for an opening
bat at Lords, walking down the long gallery between

serried ranks of peering glasses to ring the bell by the
door at the far end. What would its opening reveal,

would our glasses stand the test (several had come
from the Smith collection) and what, if anything, could
I say about them based solely on having read Elville’s
English Table Glass,
newly out at the time, and the

Sotheby’s catalogue? I needn’t have worried. Robert
(as I was soon allowed to call him), with a smiling,

genial welcome, ushered me into his tiny office piled

high with papers and found a space where my trophies
received warm approbation, one even earning the

accolade ‘rare’, apparently mentioned in a journal that

still eludes me all these years later. I contrived a few
remarks on the merit of English cutting and received,

in return, a short lecture on its history going back to

Caspar Lehmann. I had apparently passed the test and
retired feeling, if anything, more relieved than after the

interview for my doctorate!

Robert’s legendary encyclopaedic knowledge was

based on documentary study and an appreciation of

the glasses themselves. I was soon to learn that his

over-riding concern was to convince the world of the
importance of English crystal and achieve its proper
niche in glass history, far beyond the three or so

ungenerous pages in Schmidt’s
Das Glas.
Although

lacking the spectacular engraving of continental

goblets, the sequence and diversity of English common
drinking glasses from the late 17th century through the

18th century is unique. My interest was directed
towards scientific investigations — there were a number

of beliefs current at the time, such as that the 1746 tax
resulted in glasses of lower lead content, and that

glasses could be dated on colour, that I felt could be
resolved by simple experiment. Robert’s

encouragement resulted in my first talk to the Glass

Circle on
Understanding the Colour of Old Glass.
This

was before the Committee decided to produce
The

Glass Circle Journal
and I was impressed how, in the

midst of his incredibly busy life, he managed, with a

close attention to detail, to edit my unquestionably

scruffy text into a presentable form for distribution to
Circle members. Robert epitomised the attitude that if

your interest and commitment is great enough the

words ‘can’t’ and ‘too busy’ have little meaning.

We were approaching the tercentenary of

Ravenscroft’s first patent of Lead crystal and my

thoughts were naturally turning to the enigma of how

his invention was achieved. Of particular interest was

the question of how much lead was actually

introduced, and when, as Ravenscroft’s introduction of
lead glass at first faltered then prospered. Any answer
required the study of early, and therefore rare, objects.

With Robert’s guidance I prepared a case for making
density measurements on specimens in the V&A
collection, which would go some way towards an

answer. The museum approved and I was allowed to
investigate the densities of a range of their precious

objects using a non-aqueous solvent to avoid risk of

enhancing any crisselling. Tiny pinhead-sized chips
were removed from rare shards so that I could
determine their density by buoyant density method

and the results were, by chance, presented to the Circle

300 years to the day on which the Ravenscroft patent

was granted, and were later published in
The Glass

Circle.

This experience taught me that progress could only

be achieved by freely sharing all available knowledge

and in this Robert was generous to a fault. The claims
of priority in publication may be necessary for

personal advancement in a competitive age but they

should not be allowed to squeeze out the

overwhelming benefits of a greater understanding of

THE GL455 CIRCLE IOURNAL

glass and its history that shared knowledge brings to all

of us. Subsequently, we attacked the question of ruby
glass although no clear story emerged. A report was

submitted to the museum but it was never published.
I let the matter slide, under the growing pressures on a
university teacher, and was surprised when, a year or

so ago, Robert suddenly tacked the question as to
whether we should try to put something together on

this topic to the end of a letter on another
matter

entirely. Sadly, it was not to be in his lifetime.

In smaller matters, Robert taught by example.

For instance, how to assess a glass by unhurriedly

looking at all its features, using if necessary a magnifier

(which so far as I know he always carried) and

mentally judging your observations against past

experience. Easily said, but how often in the heat of the

moment is some crucial attribute overlooked to cause

the collector subsequent remorse? And again, the

overwhelming importance of terminally dating a piece
rather than optimistically attributing the earliest date

you might like it to be. Dispassionate assessment is the
hallmark of the professional and Robert led the way

where so many of us timidly follow. Perhaps this is one
reason why he abhorred pressed glass, but not all 19th

and 20th century glass in general, with its sometimes

misleading datable registration mark, although he once

said his interest was in the glass maker, not the mould
maker. Even so, he respected the need to move with

the times and the Circle did have a lecture on pressed

glass, by Barbara Morris, while he was active as
President.

Finally, you may have wondered why
I

used the style

R
J
Charleston in my title. The reason is that when I

was recently designing notepaper for the Circle I rang
up Robert to enquire which of the several alternatives

of his name I should use in the heading. He replied
`I have worked hard all
my

life to promote the name

R
J
Charleston and that is how
I
should like to be

known.’ It was an expression of his time; the use of
first names came in with expansion of published

research and the need for a clearer distinction between

authors. Identity was one matter over which Robert
need not have worried.
These personal reminiscences, directed towards glass

and ignoring almost entirely Robert’s endless

administrative involvement on behalf of the Glass

Circle, are but small sidekicks on the activities of a
great scholar. But it is through his use of scholarship,

as a friend and as a teacher that
I
believe he will be

remembered by all lovers of old glass.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

ROBERT CHARLESTON
by John Mallet

I scarcely knew Robert before joining the

Department of Ceramics and Glass at the V&A from

Sotheby’s in the autumn of 1962 and, like many who

knew him only slightly, 1 had found him rather distant
in manner. The noise and bustle of Sotheby’s, with its

informality and jolly, giggling secretaries, had not

prepared me for the deathly silence of my first weeks in
the upper offices of the Department of Ceramics.

Arthur Lane, our great keeper, was pathologically shy,

and the other two members of senior staff, Robert
Charleston and John Ayers, tended to get on silently

with their work unless spoken to. Understatement was

an early and to some extent abiding impression of
Robert, even when I had come to appreciate the warm

nature it concealed. As my first Christmas in the

Department approached, I recall his alerting me to a

glass of seasonal sherry in the lower office with the

words: ‘John, at 4.30 we go downstairs for our usual,
quiet Saturnalia.’

Robert was invariably helpful when one asked his

advice. In those days the experts in the Museum fell
into two categories: those who, like myself, kept card-

indices of our reading and observations; and those
who, like Arthur Lane and Robert, used what we called
`prayer-wheels’. These were a form of small, loose-leaf

binder on which oblong strips of paper could be

flicked over for consultation. When one asked Robert

for a reference his hand would drift up to one of the

lengthening line of grey folders on a shelf above his

desk, and almost always he would turn up a note in his
tiny writing that would tersely tell all one needed to
know. Enquirers from outside the Museum, whether

world experts or school children, also benefited from
Robert’s prayer-wheel notes.

He maintained good relations with most of our

colleagues in the Museum, and served loyally under the
manic-depressive Arthur Lane until the latter’s suicide.

Thereafter, Robert became our keeper in the
Department of Ceramics and Glass. Mutual respect

subsisted between him and two of the Directors under
whom he served, Sir Trenchard Cox and Sir John
Pope-Hennessy; it was a source of sadness to us all that

Robert’s relationship with a third director, Roy Strong,
quickly cooled. The occasion of their first falling out

was, I believe, over a delegation of keepers imploring

Roy not to spend out on a purchase grant too early in

the year, a scenario calculated to play on the young

director’s sense of insecurity. It is hard to imagine two

men worse formed by nature to hit things off than the

flamboyant Roy and the reserved Robert.

Robert Charleston’s knowledge of glass was his most

striking attribute as a scholar, but members of the
Glass Circle may forgive me for reminding them that

their former President was almost equally eminent

among those who studied English and European
ceramics and enamels. As a scholar and as a purchaser
for the Museum he ranged with distinction over all the

fields covered by his department, which in the early

days of his Keepership included the Far East. To

Michael Archer and myself he was an indulgent

and supportive chief. With his more junior staff he

seems in retrospect to have been distant by modern

standards, but no more so than was usual in his

generation. Certainly he had the well-being of us all

at heart. Nor was he lacking in dry humour. I recall
his saying apprehensively before the visit to the

department of a somewhat gushing woman: ‘I always
feel she might nuzzle under my vest.’

The support of his wife Joan, provided vital

emotional and practical back-up to Robert, and not

only enabled him to extend the hospitality of their

home in Richmond to visiting scholars, especially to

those from the Iron Curtain countries, but also freed
him to work the long, disciplined hours that he did.

The Charlestons were a devoted couple, and I shall

always remember them with affection.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL S

ROBERT CHARLESTON
by John. Scott

My strongest recollection of Robert was at the Glass

Circle Annual General Meetings. As all members will
know, this is an occasion when we are invited to bring

along interesting glasses and the panel comment

thereon. Robert, in my early years, was King, but

sometimes I felt, Lord High Executioner, of the panel.

Comments on the most ancient pieces came first,

and proceeded to the more modern. This vignette
concerns two types upon which Robert spoke. The first

were fakes; the second were post-1800! Perhaps my
memory is overly well focused on the more distant past

— as is common in the old — but I can still sense the
terror of all those present at the thought that Robert

might ascribe the creation to the 19th century. It was

like an epoch about which one did not speak; not
mentioned in polite society — a kind of Dark Ages in

the field of artistic enlightenment. And if this was a

glass masquerading as 18th century it was even worse.

No offering was ignored. The offender was lifted on

high. He gave it a good look, eyes rather curled up.

A pause; during which a stygian sense of foreboding

fell on all… ‘intersecting knop formations’…another

pause. No Gielgud or Olivier ever held an audience in

such terrifying suspense… would dear Mrs. Jones’
innocent offering be cut down, with biting scorn like

grass before the scythe?

`Ah… glass barter beads for the West African Slave

trade.’ With the most rapid and dextrous virtuosity the
offender had been returned uncondemned to the table

and the offering taken up. No one had been hurt… yet

we had all been on a roller coaster of high suspense. It

was fun.

He had a marvellous Galle in his own collection — 51-

in Portobello!
MEMORIES OF ROBERT CHARLESTON

by Jane Shade! Spillman

Armed with a letter of introduction from Paul

Perrot, Director of the Corning Museum, I spent a day

in the glass collection at the V & A with Robert in

1967, after which he and Joan kindly had me to dinner

in Richmond. During the next decade I saw them

occasionally in London or Corning and although they

were invariably pleasant and friendly, I continued to

hold Robert in some awe. When they were in Corning

in 1977, I invited Joan to tea to see my year-old

daughter — like any new mother I was convinced that
everyone wanted to come and see my treasure — and I

thought that she might be at a loss for things to do

while Robert looked at glass. To my great surprise,
Robert came too, and within a few minutes had made

friends with Beth and had her on his knee. This was a

whole new side to the eminent glass scholar, and after

that the Charlestons were our friends. I never ceased to

be amazed at Robert’s wide-ranging knowledge and, in
our family, he was referred to as ‘the man who knew
everything’. We never found a topic on which he could

not discourse intelligently and entertainingly. When he

wrote the Corning MASTERPIECES book in 1980, I

was somewhat chagrined to see that his American glass
entries were better written than I could have achieved

at that time.

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

Muriel Steevenson

JACOBITE CLUBS

II
Based on a paper read to the Circle on

19 January 1939

Collecting clubs is almost as fascinating as collecting

Jacobite glasses and infinitely
less
expensive, but while

the glass collector’s find is something tangible and

beautiful, the collector of clubs is content — and

sometimes thrilled — with sentences in history books,

allusions in memoirs and county histories, old letters,

family traditions and the like. These have to be pieced

together like jigsaw puzzles in which 95% of the bits are
missing.

To begin with, it is a definite fact that there existed

during the 18th century a large number of secret
Jacobite drinking clubs and societies. The astonishing

thing is — and it is a measure of their secrecy — that

probably the vast majority have vanished without trace
in barely 200 years.

The greatest proof now left of their existence is in fact

the club glasses themselves. It is generally agreed by

people who have gone into the subject that the majority

of clubs used glasses which belonged exclusively to

themselves, and the variety of the glasses helps to prove

the number of the clubs. Such is the opinion of Major
Eardley-Simpson whose
Derby and the Forty

–
five,
is the

best book on the English Jacobites I know. In any case

there can be little doubt that a definitely Jacobite glass is
a club relic. They were used by members of secret

societies only; and the comfortable Tory squires of the
day, who drank to the ‘King over the water’ every night

of their lives from habit and family tradition, used the

ordinary glasses of the period in comfort and security.

The more one studies 18th century toast drinking, the

more it becomes apparent that to drink a political or

treasonable toast without being sure of one’s company

was, to say the least of it, an appalling breach of good
manners, and at the worst might lead to a duel or an

arrest. One could give many instances of this. The use
of the better known Jacobite emblems on glasses was

inconceivable, except in most carefully chosen and

intimate society.

What was a Jacobite club ? I think one might say that

usually it was a small, very private society, consisting of

a group of gentlemen of any given locality, who met at
each other’s houses, or at one particular house or a

reliable inn at stated intervals — usually under the
pretext of a dinner — to discuss the political situation,

the possibilities of a restoration and, as was said of a

Yorkshire club in 1740, ‘to drink the Health and speak
of Loyalty’. That club met only once a year — a kind of
hunting party — but some, such as ‘The Cheshire Club’,

once a month. ‘The Cycle of the White Rose’ met every
three weeks and the ‘Oyster and Parched Pea Club’ at

Preston on ‘Monday night at seven’ in the winter. It was

THE CLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 1.

Ben’s Club of Aldermen, circa 1746, a mezzotint engraving by J. Faber after

Thomas Hudson (1701 — 1779) (Courtesy of Drambuie Ltd.).

A group of London Jacobite supporters who had just received a letter (on the floor) indicating that
they were not to be prosecuted for their beliefs.

these men of Honest Politics — for thus the Jacobites

always referred to their political creed — whose choice,
by some mystery of romance unknown to themselves,

lit upon the glasses which enchant us today.

Another question we must ask ourselves is, how long

did the Jacobite club last ? The earliest were probably
continuations of the old Cavalier clubs of Cromwellian
times; for example, ‘The Gloucestershire Society’ of

1659 was still in being in the middle of the 18th century

as a Jacobite club.

James II fled from England in 1688 and from that

year onwards, clubs of his supporters came into being.
In Queen Anne’s reign there were probably very many

and they do not seem to me to have been much affected

by the Rising in 1715. But possibly by the end of the

1730s and onwards until the ‘Forty-five’, there were
more than at any other period. If English Jacobitism

can ever be said to have been organised at all
(personally, I think them incapable of organising even a

jumble sale) it was in the Spring of 1744, at the time of

the threatened French invasion to bring back King
James.

One important development was the long

memorandum sent by Carte, the Jacobite historian, to

James III at Rome in 1739, outlining a plan of

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

organisation for the English Jacobites which was to rely
for its success on the English themselves, and not, as so

many expected, upon foreign troops on British soil. His

main idea was a central council of eleven leaders, with

similar councils in the large towns and a network of

Clubs throughout the country. In fact, he proposed to
use and to co-ordinate the then existing material. It

seems to have been much the most intelligent idea ever

put forward by an English Jacobite, but it was at once

vetoed by the Jacobite organisers concerned in the
rising: Balhaldy, Sempill, Traquair and the rest disliked

Carte intensely and were all jealous of each other.

I have come across no evidence whatever to show that

the clubs were connected with each other in any way at

all. They seem on the contrary to have been entirely

separate units, and apparently worked more or less in

the dark. The English leader, Lord Barrymore and his

supporters, the Duke of Beaufort, Sir Watkin Williams
Wynn, Sir John Hynde Cotton, Lord Orrery, Sir Robert

Abdy and Mr Barry, were extraordinarily secret. Butler

wrote in 1743 that they were the ones on whom all the
rest relied and who alone had been entrusted with the

whole of the Jacobite plans. The fact was that nobody
trusted anybody else. That mysterious person, the Abbe
Butler, whose secret reports to King Louis XV on the

chances of a successful rising with the aid of French

troops, have not long been made public, travelled the

country in 1743 on the pretext of selling horses. He

reported on the loyalty of each county separately, and

his report says that the secret of the French invasion,

even when it was being planned, was only known to

these seven men. It was a complete failure, however, as

the French transports were destroyed by storms. If there
had been any organised network of clubs in being at this

time Butler would most certainly have mentioned it but

he does not. In fact, he does not speak of clubs at all in

the report sent to King Louis XV in 1743.

As to Scotland, Murray of Broughton in his

Memorials,
apart from the ‘Buck’ club which he

founded himself in 1744, speaks of clubs of the King’s

friends in Edinburgh, which had by 1743 ‘increased to a

very uncommon degree’, as he puts it, but obviously

they were all small separate units and not connected at
all. It is of course perfectly possible that one man might

have belonged to several clubs if he had estates in

different parts of the country, for instance: or if he were

a Member of Parliament or a frequent visitor to
London. It is not always realised that there was an open

Jacobite party at Westminster who did their duty even

in 1745 by voting against the government on every
possible occasion.

After the ‘Forty-five’ no doubt many clubs ceased to

exist, either from disappointment or fright, but others,

while being excessively careful for some time, most

certainly went on and began to raise their heads again,
particularly in the North and West in the 1750s. The

races at Lichfield still remained a rendezvous for many

honest squires as they had been since the 1730s: they

were always a great Jacobite rallying place, the whole

county being most loyal to the Stuarts. Staffordshire

was in fact called the ‘Pretender’s patrimony’ on that

account, and in 1756 the Staffordshire Blue Coat Hunt,

a Jacobite society, hunted a fox dressed in military red

with hounds dressed up in tartan.

I think most people will agree with me that any real

chance of a Restoration was over by 1759, and this is
borne out by the fact that some fresh clubs, such as the
famous ‘Oyster and Parched Pea’ Club at Preston and

the ‘Royal Oak’ club at Edinburgh seem to have been

started in the 1760s and 1770s. At about this time, in
Scotland at any rate, the exiles were coming home –
Oliphant of Gask, Andrew Lumisden and the rest.

The distance then in time from the ‘Forty-five’ was

much the same as from the Great War till today. Clubs

seem to have become gradually less secret and more

social and one might compare them to the regimental
or Old Comrades’ dinners of the present time. It is to

the 1760s-70s period that I suggest many lovely club

glasses with more obscure emblems and perhaps white
enamel stems belong, and if they have not the intrinsic

value of the earlier types, they deserve more study and,
perhaps, greater appreciation. There are hints of

obscure and deeply laid Jacobite schemes and plots as
late as
1784

and 1798; but by then Jacobitism had

become either a mania or a memory.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

I shall now refer to a few of the clubs most interesting

to glass collectors, beginning with that ‘glass collector’s

dream’, the Cycle Club or more accurately, the ‘Cycle of

the White Rose.’ This club was doubly lucky in that it
had an unbroken existence of nearly 150 years and

because the last Lady Patroness of the Club in 1852, was
afterwards known personally to Mr Hartshorne, who

was thus able to examine a few glasses which were

indubitably used by the Williams-Wynn family at

Wynnstay. Founded on James III’s birthday, 10 June
1710, by one of the Williams-Wynns, the ‘Cycle of the

White Rose’ held its meetings at Wrexham, all members

living within seven miles of that place. In 1723 it was
reorganised, and I have a copy of the rules drawn up

and signed by the members (sixteen in all) on that
occasion. They sound innocent enough, but the Cycle

was undoubtedly a secret Jacobite Council for North
Wales.

The club met every three weeks at the house of

each member in turn — hence the word ‘cycle’ — and it

was probably about 1723 that the radius was extended
from 7 to 15 miles around Wrexham, and as far as
I

can

discover, that remained roughly its sphere of influence
to the end. The Cycle Club area thus included Denbigh,
Flint and part of Cheshire and North Shropshire, and

was no doubt a powerful influence on an area always
strongly Jacobite.

In 1770, however, the ‘Cycle of the White Rose’

became non-political and the members met at the
`Eagle’ at Wrexham to make new rules. There seem to

have been 40 to 60 members at that time and a Welsh
author states their badge was a flying wheel and later on

a little gold button. A new era began in 1780, after

which the meetings were always held at Wynnstay and
the Williams-Wynn of the day -the Sir Watkin of the

Rising — became Hereditary Patron of the Club and his

wife the first Lady Patroness. She was apparently the
only Lady admitted to the dinners.

[There is however a much earlier precedent to this in

the records of the ancient ‘Mayor and Corporation of
Cheadle’, another Jacobite club whose existence was
only discovered in 1931.
It
was a large club which lasted
from

1699 to 1720.
its rules and list of members are

now known. In 1711 they elected a lady to the curious

position of `Slatholder’ and nine others were present at

the annual dinner to support her.]

To return to the Cycle. In 1815 there were still 34

members, and an account of a dinner in 1843 mentions

about 30. The club ended in the 1850s, thus providing

an unbroken record of Cycle Club dinners over a
period of 140 years. So where do the so-called ‘Cycle

Club glasses’ begin and end ?

We are all aware that fashions in glass changed during

the lifetime of the Club. When, for example, Mr
Egerton of Oulton hosted the Cycle Club at his house

on 17 December 1723, the glasses he provided were

surely of a different type from the set ordered by his

descendant, another Egerton of Oulton, from one
Duesbury at Derby for the Club in 1771. Such changes

in fashion account for the fact that when club glasses

have been found in the possession of descendants of

their original owners, the types vary. I am speaking, of

course, of the earlier glasses now, as unluckily the later

Jacobite glasses, being much less secret, have been so

much neglected that it is probably impossible to trace

them to their original sources. To anyone interested in

the history of glass, it seems a thousand pities that when

Club glasses of any date are purchased, efforts are not

always made to trace their place or family of origin.

There does not seem to me to be any evidence for the

assertion so frequently made by writers on glass that the

word ‘Fiat’ was ever exclusive to the Cycle Club. Even

Hartshorne in his scholarly work admits in a note that
he could find no absolute proof of it. This is not to say

that ‘Fiat’ glasses were never used in the houses of

different members of the Cycle Club, simply that

because some members of that club owned ‘Fiat’ glasses

is no reason to assert that all ‘Fiat’ glasses were made for
the Cycle Club. ‘Fiat’ was almost certainly used by

members of other clubs as well, and it is unlikely that

there was more than the most casual links between

these Jacobite Clubs. The following table illustrates my

argument.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Known ‘Jacobite’ Glasses

Club Locality

Original owner

Glasses

Exeter

Walker

5 ‘Reddas incolumem’.

(Hartshorne)

3 ‘Fiat’.

Chastleto n

Henry Jones

(Hartshorne)

(d 1761)

11 ‘Fiat’ (Rose, 2 buds, oakleaf).

2 decanters (star and compass).

Radbourne Hall
cf Charlie’s Trees

German Pole
died 1763
`Redeat’: Rose (2 buds & star)

? contemporary with Medal
1752 (Francis).
`Fiat’ with Prince of Wales’

feathers on foot/rose and 2 buds

Another with thistle.

Crown & thistle decanter.

8-petalled Rose & Star.

Shrewsbury

Sir M Hale

9 bell-bowl, simple air twist.

2 knops, star, thistle, rose and 2

buds.
portrait, straight-sided bowl

profile, wreath, rose & thistle.

Middlesex

Sir R Newdigate,

MP for county

(Grant Francis)

1743-7

p 164

MP for Oxford Univ

1750-80
`Here’s to the much loved

health with all my heart’.

4 drawn air twist & initials
`WW’, ‘IB’, `RA”MS,’.

20 ‘Fiat’, drawn air twist rose: 2

buds, oak leaf & star.

London

Oak Society

‘Revirescif, ‘Revirescit

Fiat’, Topped or

Beheaded Oak.

Worcester

Ancestor of

2 chic vir hic est.’

disguised

Addis Price

as a Friendly

Society

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Glasses
Portrait & ‘God bless

the Prince’; ‘Cordial

health to all our fast

Friends’ (Rose & buds).
1 Tall Glass (Rose &

bud) used at Wynnstay
and owned by the Dowager

Lady Williams-Wynn

(last Lady Patroness).

5 ‘Fiats’, airtwist, buds
oaldeaf/1 ‘Fiat’, straight

sided plain stem. Rose & 2 buds.

Rose glasses without ‘Fiats’.

6 ‘Fiat’

1 Charles Ye Great
Glass to Sir W Wynn.

4 Large with Prince of Wales’s

Feathers.

Club Locality

Cycle of the

White Rose

Society

Radius, 15

miles

around Wrexham
Original owner

W W-Wynn

Cheshire Club

Legh of Lyme Hall

1689-1720

probably joined

(Lady Newton)

another club after

1720

Did not belong to
reformed cycle

in 1723

Oxburgh Hall

Bedingfield Family

Connoisseur

(a Col. Oxburgh

Vol XXI, p 17

beheaded in 1716)

Here are eleven Jacobite clubs, none of which, with

the doubtful exception of the Cycle Club, had any

connection with the ‘Cycle of the White Rose’, whose

word according to nearly all writers on glass was ‘Fiat’.

Yet here ‘Fiat’ occurs eight times out of eleven; one of

the two exceptions being the Cycle Club glasses from

Wynnstay. Certainly it seems that ‘Fiat’ was the most
popular toast-word ever put upon Jacobite glass.

Perhaps it was the earliest, or perhaps the first engraver

of Jacobite glass made a fashion of it. My own idea, for

want of a better, is that probably as far back as Queen
Anne’s reign, ‘Fiat’ was a secret sign or password

whereby one Jacobite might recognise another. By
degrees it would become so well known amongst them

as to be used as a toast. Then it was put on the glasses.

After all, the word ‘Fiat’ by itself means very little. It is

only in connection with Jacobite glasses that it appears
incriminating. In itself it is harmless in comparison
with mottoes such as `Reddas incolumem’ and so forth.
In 1716, two days before his execution for complicity

in the Rising of 1715, James, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater,
received a letter from his Bishop ending with the words,

`Fiat, fiat, the cause would go on’, and the condemned

man understood. The Earl had been a member of a very

famous old club in North Lancashire, ‘The Mayor and
Corporation of Walton-en-le-Dale.’ He attended its

meetings in 1710 and was its Mayor the following year.

The club was in being as early as 1701 and lasted until
1740 or 1741, although another authority says until

1766. It was composed of Catholic and Jacobite nobility

and gentry and met at the Unicorn Inn at Walton-en-
le-Dale. Some club relics — wooden staves decorated

with silver bands and dated 1701 — still existed in
Preston sixty years ago, but I am afraid no-one thought

of trying to identify its glasses. As it met at a remote inn,
it is possible that in this case the members each brought
their own glass with them in a case, but so far I have

found no mention of the practice anywhere.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Another club several times mentioned in books on

glass was ‘John Shaw’s’ at Manchester. Now this was a
`Punch Club’ and strictly speaking, not a secret club at

all. It was founded in 1738 by John Shaw, an artist in
Punch-making and lasted in various forms until 1892,

the same unbroken punch-bowl being used for 157

years. The punch was served in bowls of two sizes,
costing respectively sixpence and one shilling. The

shilling size was called a ‘P’ of punch and the sixpenny

size a ‘Q’ of punch. Hence perhaps the phrase, ‘Mind

your Ps and Qs’. At closing time John Shaw cracked a

large whip, but if this proceeding did not clear his
customers, his maid Mollie, with true Lancashire

directness, began to swill the floor and anyone who

lingered got his feet wet. John Shaw died in 1798, and

there is no doubt that the most famous Manchester
Jacobites used this club in its early years.

The most interesting London club, so far as I know at

present, from the glass collector’s point of view, is the
`Oak Society’ which met at the Crown and Anchor

Tavern opposite St Clement Dane’s in the Strand. The
Oak Medal struck in 1750 was made for this Club. It

bears the words ‘Revirescie and on the reverse is a

broken tree from the roots of which spring young

shoots. Surely, therefore, glasses thus engraved

belonged to the Oak Society. This oak tree emblem is

very interesting. Mr Francis thinks the glass came after

the medal. But the beheaded or topped oak is a great

deal earlier than that. It is known that oak trees were

topped or beheaded by Cavaliers as a symbol of
mourning for Charles 1, and the Countess of

Monmouth, when her husband was beheaded after
Sedgemoor, had the oak trees at Moor Park treated in

the same way. It thus signifies, I think, mourning for the

fugitive King and the Saplings, a hope for a Restoration.

At any rate, from the antiquity of the emblem chosen

for the Oak Society glass, it is possible that the Society

first began, Iike the Gloucestershire Society mentioned

earlier, as a Cavalier Club in the Commonwealth. There

is a very early glass illustrated in Mr Thorpe’s book,

which was made in 1660 for Charles II’s coronation. It

too bears a beheaded oak, which I think bears out my

view. There was even a proposed Order of Knighthood
of the Royal Oak, for which 600 names were suggested

at the Restoration, but the idea was dropped in case
invidious distinctions might be made a cause of
friction. The ‘Oak Society’ may even derive from this.

Very few glasses with a five-petalled rose are known.

Chambers, in his
Book of Days,

reproduces an

impression from a secretly engraved plate believed to

have been made by Sir Robert Strange, the famous

engraver who fought at Culloden. In the centre of the
rose are the words ‘Martyred for King and Country

1746’ while outside the inner petals is the motto ‘Fear
God, Honour the King.’ Round the outside edge are the

names and birthdays of Charles Edward and his brother

Henry. The small circles are composed of the names of
Jacobites executed, but of these, 38 (less than half) are

on the rose.

I suggest that this is the Roll of Honour of the White

Rose Society. If compared with the rose on the

`Highlander’ medal it shows a great similarity. If my

surmise is correct, the White Rose Society must have
been a large one, possibly formed in the Jacobite army

when it first came into being. In any case, this

contemporary Jacobite five-petalled rose proves that

such roses are every bit as Jacobite as those with six,

seven, eight or more petals which appear on glasses.

I have only had time to mention a third of the clubs

known to me, but I hope I have brought forward

enough evidence to show that neither English Jacobite

clubs nor the ‘Fiat’ glasses were confined to North

Wales.

THE GLASS CIRCLE /OUR.NAL

-1414
01M110

The Crawley Glass. A rare Jacobite Wine Glass engraved with a rose, two

buds and a thistle beneath the inscription SUCCESS TO THE SOCIETY, set

on an opaque twist stem and conical foot, 5gin.
(Private collection, photo courtesy of Sotheby’s).

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

III
Martin Mortimer

THE CRYSTAL CHANDELIER
FROM THE KING’S

AUDIENCE CHAMBER
NOW THE KING’S PRIVY CHAMBER
HAMPTON COURT PALACE

Figure 1.

Chandelier of nine lights encrusted

with rock-crystal beads. The Queen’s State Bedroom,
Hampton Court Palace.
A paper read to the Circle on 17 March

1992.

Any consideration of English glass chandeliers tends

to start with those at Hampton Court since they are all

of early date. Yet, although something is beginning to
be known and written about makers of glass lighting

fittings in the mid to late 18th century and later still,

the origins of at least one of the three crystal-

embellished chandeliers at the Palace, that in the King’s
Audience Chamber remains obscure.

The severe damage which that particular chandelier

suffered in the fire of 1986 led to discussions between

the Royal Collection and the writer’s firm as to the

feasibility of restoration. The fragments had been
painstakingly gathered up from the ashes by a trained

group from English Heritage and were subsequently
conveyed to Kensington. After some consideration it

was agreed that an attempt should be made and a

bonus of this decision was the possibility of close study

which only total dismantling could allow. Although
26

THE GLASS CIRCLE. JOURNAL

initially there was hope that this might lead to

something more concrete in terms of date and source
than mere tradition, the sum total revealed was

disappointing and all too little light has been thrown on
the origins of this and the few similar chandeliers that

have survived.

Tradition has it that this is the oldest of the three. The

earliest mention of a ‘crystal’ branch at Hampton Court

is 1700.` Of the other two, that in the Queen’s State
Bedroom today seems to be the fitting made up by

Benjamin Goodison in 1736-7 ‘out of crystal’ to carry

nine candles.’ This description conforms to the present

layout, the chandelier having a silvered brass frame set

with continuous rows of presumably crystal beads. The
third chandelier containing crystal is that in the

Queen’s Audience Chambee(fig. 2). This is the one

with a frame composed of massive castings of opposing
pairs of Lions and Unicorns in silvered brass with

added crystal enrichments.

Figure 3.

The rock-crystal chandelier from

the King’s Audience Chamber, Hampton

Court Palace, later damaged in the fire. From a

photograph taken in 1946.

The present example (fig. 3), which is said to date

from the late 17th century, comprises a slender central

suspension rod on to which are threaded a succession
of turned crystal spheres and hemispheres alternating

with silvered brass discs each pierced with twelve holes
around the circumference. The rod supports a heavy

turned arm plate for the twelve metal arms: these
terminate in flat platforms for fluted crystal pans and
nozzles and large hooks for ornamental festoons and

pendants. Below is a complicated basket of threaded

crystals and pendants culminating in a central

composite finial. Above is a wired-out element,
formerly of flattened cushion shape, and around the

central part of the chandelier and forming its body is a

corset of interlacing strands of beads. Further strands

The Lion and Unicorn chandelier
radiate from the pierced metal discs on the central

and hung with rock-crystal drops. The
suspension rod, and these meet the corset at the

Queen’s Audience Chamber, Hampton Court Palace.
intersections of the outer strands. At each junction is

Figure 2.

encrusted

THE GLASS CIRCLE 10LIRNAL 8

Figure 4.

The King’s Audience Chamber

chandelier after fire damage (detail of body).
Working backwards, Fyne,’ whose visual records of

the contents of Royal houses have generally been found

to be reliable, shows a chandelier of glass or crystal, not
in the King’s Audience Chamber but in the First

Presence Chamber, which only superficially resembles

the one under discussion (fig. 5). Although

approximately the same size, it appears to have been
composed of vertical strings of three and five ‘drops’,

superimposed and forming a cylinder from the bottom
of which extend arms for, so far as can be judged, twelve

lights. These support two further rows of circular
`drops’. Under magnification, however, it can be seen

that the ‘drops’ are in fact multiple assemblies of radial
drops, or rosettes. Is this a less than accurate
representation of the present chandelier, or had the

chandelier been drastically altered to conform more

closely to the taste of the 19th century ? Was the

Figure 5.

The King’s First Presence Chamber,

Hampton Court Palace, as illustrated in Pyne’s Royal

Residences (1819), perhaps showing the King’s
Audience Chamber chandelier.

affixed a rosette. The whole concept is complex and it
will be readily comprehended that the passage of time,

countless inept repairs and finally, the ravages of the
fire, had rendered the whole collapsed mess of the

chandelier very difficult to interpret (fig.4).

It is not proposed to dwell in depth on the restoration

in this article but, briefly, during the rebuilding, a series
of compromises had to be accepted. It was an early
hope that total dismantling would reveal whether the
chandelier was an original artefact subject only to
regular repair. This was not so. For one thing, the arm

plate and arms had been stamped (rather than

engraved) with two series of numbers. This factor

indicated two things: a change of layout at some time,

and a method of identification inconsistent with the
chandelier’s traditional date of the late 17th century. At

that time numbers would have been engraved. Thus

alterations had been made, but when and to what

degree ?
chandelier `Georgianised’ only to be ‘restored’ at some

later time to what tradition and perhaps long memory
considered correct ? It is a small detail, but the form of

the suspension shackle of the chandelier and its
mechanical details is exactly what one would expect to

find on a fitting of this size made in 1810-20. The

turned ball finials which secure the arms into their

central plate also appear to be of this period, although

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 6.

One of four crystal chandeliers at

Penshurst Place, Kent.

Iess reliably so. Perhaps the first re-build, if such there

was (and it is an unlikely hypothesis) retained the
rosettes as originally wired up and re-hung them in

vertical strands.

The form of the metal arms of the chandelier with

their shallow, cautious profile seems not to reflect the
richness of the attributed date of origin. One would

expect a far more vigorous design of scroll and step, and

it was felt initially that the arms too were part of a later
re-building. Nevertheless, resolution of some of these

doubts can be gained by reference to the only

comparable fittings in this country, those at Penshurst

Place.

The Penshurst chandeliers, which comprise a set of

four (fig. 6) and another larger but of similar form (fig.
7), were reputedly given by William III to Henry, son of

Robert, 2nd Earl of Leicester, whom he created Earl of

Romney, presumably some time after 1688. Various

structural features suggest that the five chandeliers were
made in the same workshop. The layout is very similar

to that of the Hampton Court example. Here again are
the strands of beads, the rosettes and the pendent,

faceted pears, but all in simpler form. Much of the

original crystal has been replaced with glass (as is now,

since the fire, the case at Hampton Court). The turnings
on the stems are here of metal, probably of brass, in the
case of the four, and of gilded (or silvered and
lacquered) wood in the single, larger chandelier. Above

all, the shallow profile of the metal arms is virtually

identical to that on the Royal chandelier. The central
fixings of these arms is far more consistent with a late

17th century date than those at Hampton Court: they
terminate at their inner ends in square pegs which are

secured in their sockets with tapered clock pins. The

nozzles and pans are of turned brass. Thus, although far

less elaborate, the Penshurst chandeliers are clearly

Figure 7.

English crystal chandelier at Penshurst

Place, Kent.

related at least in structure to that at Hampton Court,

although there appear to be no comparable crystal
beads. Did the 19th century restorer of this chandelier,
if such there was, resort to the Penshurst series for

guidance as the only available examples in this country

considered authentic ?

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

7
1111111

replacements. Miss Dyrssen suggests that it is French. A

third (fig. 9) frequently illustrated and hanging at

Drottningsholms Slott is again very rich and perhaps
most closely resembles that at Hampton Court both in

the elaboration of its construction and in the manner in

which its rosettes have been fashioned and positioned.
It has a metal finial shaped as a fleur-de-lys.

All three chandeliers illustrated by Miss Dyrssen have

metal pans and nozzles on shallow arms similar to those

at Penshurst, and two are clothed at least partially with
drops of rock-crystal. It must be said that the writer has

not had the opportunity to inspect these chandeliers
personally and views at least the first with some

suspicion. The only other chandelier of the series the
writer has so far noticed is that recently acquired in
Paris by the Getty Museum (fig. 10). It is given an
estimated date of
circa
1700 and is attributed once more

to France. It also sports a comfortingly French fleur-de-

lys just below the shackle which itself is much more the

sort of thing one would have liked to find suspending

Figure 8.

A chandelier of crystal beads and

pendants sold by Christie’s at Monaco, 18 June 1989.

Other comparable chandeliers survive on the

Continent, notably in Sweden. Indeed, an example was

recently sold at auction in Monaco extremely near in
concept and detail to the Penshurst group (fig.8).

Details of nozzle, pan and arm design virtually
matched, as did the slender metal stem-turnings on the

shaft, the simple rosettes and interconnecting strands of

beads.. The Swedish examples tend to be more

elaborate and nearer to that at Hampton Court in
richness. Eva Dyrssen illustrates three which fall

broadly into the series in her book.’ One, for the King’s

Hall in Skoldoster is densely constructed, albeit from

the customary strands of beads set with rosettes at the

intersections: the beads and the drops are of glass, now
much crisselled. By repute this was made in Melchior
Jung’s factory in the 1670s and has hung in this room

ever since. Another from the Royal House,
Husgeradskammarens, is more slender in form but of

similar density. The chandelier is partly hung in rock-

crystal: the present additions in glass may be later
Figure 9.

Crystal chandelier from the Royal

Palace at Drottningsholms Slott, Sweden.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 10.

The crystal chandelier recently

acquired from France by the Paul Getty Museum,
California.

the Hampton Court chandelier. So far as can be seen in
the museum’s good photograph, the drops appear to be

at least largely of rock-crystal. The design diverges from

other examples with its tufts of stylised leaves but the
double rosettes are the same as are the outer sections of

the arms; the inner curves, however, turn over and
plunge vertically into the plate. Again, the writer has

been unable to examine the chandelier in the flesh, but
it can be seen that the patterns of several of the beads

are the same as those at Hampton Court, as are those

which can be indentified in two of the three Swedish

examples.

It is difficult to assemble conclusions. It seems likely

that the first crystal-enriched chandeliers were

extremely costly possessions of the wealthy.’ The fact

that few appear to have survived despite their metal

structure might suggest that few were made (although
this is not always a reason for rarity) and the survival of

several in Sweden together with the fortuitous
appearance of others on the Continent suggest a pan-
European style. It is difficult to date them. Eva Dyrssen

gives dates of 1670 for one of hers, that with the
dubious dressings, and ‘after 1600′ for the other two.

When the Duke of Albemarle died in 1670, his Lying-
in-State at Somerset House formed part of the funeral

arrangements which were ordered by the King and thus

under the control of the Royal Wardrobe. Three

consecutive rooms were used. In the innermost room a

State Bed supported the coffin and amongst the

paraphernalia considered essential was hanging a
`Crystal Branch with Twelve Sockets, and therein as

many Tapers of Wax.’ The scene is illustrated in Francis

Sandford’s ‘Funeral of the Great Duke of Albemarle’

(fig. 11) in extreme detail and it can clearly be seen that

this chandelier, too, had a fleur-de-lys finial.

That a complicated artefact such as a crystal

chandelier should be moved about as occasions

required need not evince surprise. At that time they

were rare possessions of great circumstance. Indeed,
right through to the end of the 18th century it was not

Figure 11.

The illustration of the Lying-in-State

of the 1st Duke of Albemarle at Somerset House in
1670, from the account published by Francis

Sandford.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

uncommon to find records of chandeliers being hired

or lent for great occasions when the venue lacked

furnishings of sufficient calibre. Sometimes they were

simply hung on a pole and taken through the streets.

There is little doubt that this sort of handling will have
resulted in the need for running repairs. Gerald Heath
noted references to chandeliers, sconces and

candlesticks being returned to the Jewel House (the

Lord Steward’s department) from time to time to be

`boyled and burnished’ or `boyled and refreshed’.

Presumably this was for the removal of accumulated

tallow wax and a general buffing-up, and doubtless
refers to metal chandeliers.

In establishing the date of these chandeliers we have

two guides within this country. The presence of the

chandelier at the Lying-in-State of the Duke of
Albemarle is one of them, and it is tempting to think

that the Hampton Court fitting was in fact used, since if

it existed it would have been in London then. Certainly
the description fits in all the details given and it was to a

degree a Royal funeral. The second pointer is the
needlework picture illustrated here (fig. 12). At first

sight it would hardly appear relevant, but it can be
dated on grounds of style and the existence of other

dated examples to the years between 1660 and 1670. In
naive pursuit of realism, the needlewoman has included

minerals: a bead of coral and one or two of crystal. One

of these is cut with flat spirals. This precise pattern of
bead in various sizes is that most frequently used in the

Hampton Court chandelier. The presence of such a
bead in domestic needlework suggests that they were

available from the suppliers of materials for crafts plied
by industrious ladies at home, and reinforces the

thought that these elaborate chandeliers might have
been constructed by upholsterers used to handling the

incredibly rich and costly trimmings which fashion

expected in the embellishment of the splendid Court
furniture of the later 17th century. Indeed, on being

shown the chandelier at a late stage of its
reconstruction, John Cornforth exclaimed ‘it is a great

tassel — it is the work of an upholsterer’. And it is true

that the actual structure is minimal and restricted to the

fittings of the arms to the central plate; all the rest

comprises beads of various forms on wire.
Figure 12.

Sturnpwork picture which includes

coral, pearls and cut crystal beads. English, circa

1660-1670.

Some of the elements are quite complex. The

principal rosettes, for instance, of which there are

upwards of eight sets, six of which number twelve units,

each consist of an outer ring of eleven flat, pear-shaped

drops. Superimposed on this is an inner ring of eleven

tapered drops of circular section. The centre is formed

by a faceted spherical bead from the middle of which

hangs a finial pear drop. The pendants, which hang

from the main hooks at the ends of the arms (fig.13)
had at some time been placed in the centres of the
principal outer festoons, pulling them out of shape.

They were all irreparably crushed with the weight of the

material which descended on the chandelier during the

fire, but were not, in any case of period manufacture,
their armatures being soldered up inexpertly from

galvanized wire and ill-formed circlets of zinc.
However, they seemed to provide a suitably sumptuous

touch and are likely to be poor copies of originals so

they were re-created. Due to reduction in usable

materials from damage, they now have six radial spokes

set with beads, rosettes and peardrops rather than eight

as formerly. They support the main finial peardrops
round the outer circumference of the chandelier. This

was one of many compromises which had to be made

during the reconstruction. In a way, the fact that the
chandelier had probably passed through several

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

changes made such compromises easier: one was not

aiming at a known original state.

The most obvious and perhaps controversial change

was the rearrangement of the top feature to create a

quartered crown. As can be seen, many of these

chandeliers have crown features at the top and it is
possible, though not certain, that the top of the

Hampton Court chandelier was of crown form in

section. The rather cushion-shaped top had changed in
outline between the 1920s (fig. 14) and 1946, its last

photograph (fig. 3). Soft copper wire had been used of
necessity, since anything more stiff would certainly

break up brittle crystal beads when formed into tight
curves. In any case, the closeness of the radial wire
requires the smallest ovoid beads as they converge on

the centre of the chandelier, and a considerable number

of these were broken beyond repair. Division of the top

allowed use of fewer drops. Soft wire was used again but

an interior frame was provided to retain the crown

form.

Figure 14.

The King’s Audience Chamber

chandelier as it was illustrated in MacQuoid and

Edwards, Dictionary of English Furniture (Country

Life, 1924).

One of the aims of the restoration was to arrive at a

reasonable symmetry. This has been achieved to a

considerable degree although a resulting penalty had to

be the relegation of parts of sets of drops, less than sixes

and twelves, to a spares box. Sense has been made of the
rosettes so that each assembly has drops of one pattern

where they were previously muddled. As many
individual parts as possible, beads, pears, rosettes, were

put together from salvaged fragments where all or most
of each component could be found and matched.

Upwards of four hundred small parts were repaired in
this way from pieces sieved from the ashes. Even so,

very many beads still have visible interior stress cracks.

It is presumed that these occurred when the firemens’

water reached the crystals which were very warm. The
heat can be gauged by the fact that the wax of the

candles had melted but the wicks survived still white

from the King’s

(fig.15). Nevertheless, rock-crystal is naturally full of

stress, and the contrast of the cold water splintered

Figure

13.

Arm
pendant

Audience Chamber chandelier after restoration.

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL S

Figure 15.

Fragments of nozzles from the King’s

Audience Chamber chandelier, embedded in ash set

with grease from melted candles and threaded with

surviving wicks.

much of the warm mineral. It was necessary to test all

crystals with visible interior cracks before using them in
positions which would eventually be inaccessible. If

they broke up, they could be repaired before use. In the

event, partly through shortage of matching material, all
the interior radial strands of beads were replaced with

glass, as were about half of the tiny beads which form

the trellis of the main body.

The quality of all the material is exceptional.

There are upwards of forty different patterns of bead,
six types of drop for the rosettes and many forms of

finial drop (fig. 16). There are cup-shaped components

cut from the solid and pillar-cut on the outside (fig. 17).

These are extraordinary, being oval in plan and thus
gouged out by hand and polished rather than lathe-
turned, before being fluted. Practically none of the

nozzles (and none at all of the pans) survived in usable

state. Replacements were made in Germany— in rock-
crystal (fig. 13).

All in all, the restoration of the Hampton Court

chandelier falls far short of satisfying academic aims.
However, given the haphazard history of the piece and
the probable repeated reconstructions, it has at least

been possible to take advantage of the disaster to

improve some previous work and arrive at a secure
future for the chandelier. To the uncritical eye, the

chandelier looks as it did. Even those formerly familiar

with it will probably remark principally on the fact that
it is now brilliantly clean (fig. 18).

Figure 18.

The King’s Audience Chamber chan-

delier after restoration.

.—• • • • 7••

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL
8

Figure 16.

A selection of various

patterns of rock-crystal drops and

beads.

Figure 17.

The cup-shaped rosettes,

cut from solid crystal.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

NOTES

1.
The late Gerald Heath researched lighting at the

Palace in recent years. I am most grateful to Mrs
Juliet Allen of English Heritage for bringing his
notes to the attention of Miss Jane Holdsworth and
thus to mine, and I am particularly obliged to Mrs

Joan Heath for her permission to use relevant

material from her husband’s gleanings. The only

two 18th century references to a crystal chandelier

seem to be firstly the Lord Chamberlain’s Warrant
of 16 July 1700 for the provision of three white

serge covers ‘to draw close over the crystall and two

silver branches’ PRO (Public Record Office)

LC5/70. At this time only the King’s State Rooms

were completed so there was by then a crystal chan-

delier somewhere in the King’s Suite. Secondly,
Celia Fiennes, by whom a visit is supposed to have

been made about 1705, and whose recollections are

less than wholly accurate, mentions the ‘Dining

Room’ next to the ‘Presence Chamber’ in which

there was a `Chrystall’ branch. Thus she noticed a

crystal chandelier in the room next to that in which
Pyne records it in 1819. Meanwhile W B Cook,

writing in 1822, notes in the Audience Chamber a

silver chandelier of sixteen branches.
The whole subject is rendered the more confusing
by changes in the nomenclature of rooms. It is
generally now agreed that when the Court was at
Hampton the King’s Suite was used as follows:
(1)

Guard Chamber, (2) The Presence Chamber in

which both Audiences and State Dinners were held

and in which was the first of the Chairs of State
beneath a canopy, (3) The Eating Room where the
King would normally dine, (4) The Privy Chamber
(lately called the Audience Chamber) with another

canopy and Chair of State, (5) The Drawing Room,
(6) State Bedchamber, (7) Little Bedchamber, (8)

The Closet.

2.
PRO/LC9/167, 1736-7.

3.
Confusion continues. A reference to Benjamin

Goodison relates to his provision of two
chandeliers of silvered metal for 12 lights each,
`neatly wrought and adorned with crystal in being’

(PRO/LC9/11, 1735-6). The term ‘in being’

suggests re-use of earlier material. The Lion and the
Unicorn chandelier provides arms for 16 candles,

so is presumably not related to the above two.
Nevertheless, a tradition exists that, on dismantling

the Lion and the Unicorn chandelier at some
unspecified time, a cleaner discovered a scrap of

paper within recording that the chandelier was
made by William Griffiths in 1736. The date fits the

supply of Goodison’s pair, but Gerald Heath failed
to find Griffiths’ name in the Lord Chamberlain’s
books. The following note, which seems to refer,

was recorded by Mr Heath. It is typed on the
headed paper of C W H Wheeler and Sons,
Furnishing Upholsterers etc etc, Hampton Wick,

and is dated July 1937. ‘This chandelier, made by
William Griffiths, servant to
Mr

Goodison, His

Majesty’s cabinet maker, July 20th 1736 was

cleaned and repaired by Edward Bray, artizan in the
employ of Messrs G Forest and Son of Nevill’s

Court, New Street Square, London, August 29th

1856. It was taken to pieces and cleaned 21st July

1937 by C W H Wheeler and R F Wheeler
(partners) of the above firm. The chandeliers in the

King’s Audience Chamber and the Queen’s

Bedroom were also taken down, taken to pieces

and cleaned during the same month.’

4.
W H Pyne,
History of the Royal Residences

(1819).

5.
Eva Dyrssen and Katarina Arte,

GAMLA

LJUSKRONOR av glas och bergkristall
(Nordiska

Museet, (1986)).

6.
Mrs Mary Boyden draws the author’s attention to

an inventory in the possession of the Ormonde

family taken at Kilkenny Castle in 1705 which

mentions ‘One Cristiall Shambileire with 10
branches and guilt Socketts with 2 ‘mole ribands’ in
the Drawing Room. At such a date this chandelier

can scarcely have been of glass.

THE GLASS CIRCLE IDIJRNAL

Acknowledgements

Illustrations Nos 1-5, 13-18 are reproduced with the

gracious permission of Her Majesty The Queen. No 9
is from the Swedish Royal Collection, Nos 6 & 7 with

the permission of Viscount De L’Isle, No 8 Christie’s,

No 10 with the permission of the J Paul Getty

Museum, California, No 11 the Society of Antiquaries,

and No 12 Delomosne and Son Ltd.

The author is deeply grateful to Eva Dyrssen of

Stockholm for specific help in supplying information

and photographs of chandeliers in the Swedish Royal
Collection, and to Mrs Vera Collingwood for
photographs at Penshurst Place.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Dr David Stuart

MASONIC GLASS
IN ENGLAND

IV A paper read to the Circle on 15 February
1990.

Modern masonry is directly descended from the

working masonry of earlier ages, and this ancestry is
reflected in its structure, ritual and symbolism. Rank in

masonry is derived from the mediaeval guilds, which

may themselves have been derived from the
collegia

fabrorum
of the Roman empire,’ while the ritual and

symbolism are largely based on the building of King

Solomon’s temple, so vividly described in the Bible.’

Modern (non-operative or ‘speculative’) masonry

originated in England in the 17th century, the first

record being the initiation of an antiquary, Elias

Ashmole, in 1646
3

into a Lodge. The custom of

admitting non-masons into Lodges spread rapidly
during the next fifty years, and by 1676 Dr Robert Plot
in his
Natural History of Oxfordshire
was referring to the

popularity of freemasonry and its admission

ceremonies. By the beginning of the 18th century some

Lodges appear to have broken the connection with

operative masonry as a working craft and were being
patronised by the wealthy and noble, and in 1717, four

London Lodges united to form the Grand Lodge of

England. By 1735 Grand Lodge had incorporated 129

Lodges, including those in Gibraltar, Madrid and

Boston, New England, and when my Lodge was formed

in Yarmouth in 1797, it was No 564.
Freemasonry was divided during the 18th century. In

1751, a group of Irish brethren who could not gain

admission to London Lodges formed the Antient Grand
Lodge who rather unchronologically called the

members of the premier Grand Lodge ‘Moderns’ I

There was also, based in York, a ‘Grand Lodge of all
England’ from 1761-1792. In 1813 the `Antients’ and

`Moderns’ combined to form the present United Grand

Lodge. The differing coats of arms give some indication

of date.

The original Grand Lodge adopted the coat of arms

of the London Company of Masons with minor
differences. The basic form is that of a silver chevron on

which is an open pair of gold compasses, with three

silver castles, two above and one below the chevron.

The original motto was that of the London Company –

‘In the Lord is all our trust’ but this was changed within
a few years to (in Greek) ‘In the beginning was the

word’. The form is shown on a fine gilded decanter (fig.
1) of the London Lodge of Perfect Union. The decanter
presumably dates from circa 1770 and is of such fine

workmanship that a Giles workshop attribution seems
reasonable. The coat of arms of the `Antients’ should

date from 1751 to 1813. It shows a quartered shield
containing a man with arms raised, a lion, an ox and an
eagle, with the Hebrew motto ‘Kodesh lo Adonai’ (Holy
unto the Lord: fig.2).
4

However, dating on this basis

cannot be secure as Churchill’s
Glass Notes
(No 15, p 8)

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 1.

Blue decanter, gilt with the Mason’s

Arms as used by the ‘Moderns’, Lodge of Perfect
Union, circa 1770 (GL).

depicts a tumbler with these arms dated 1824. The two

coats of arms were combined when the Lodges reunited
in 1813, and appear on the present coat of arms side by

side, supported by cherubs with the motto ‘Audi Vide
Tace’. In 1919 a coat of arms was granted with the
addition of a red border bearing the lions of England in
commemoration of the Royal connections with

Freemasonry.

One of the most surprising discoveries made in

researching this paper was the apparent total absence of

glass decorated before 1760. Freemasonry was
flourishing well before this date, and when one

considers the volume of glass still in existence from

another popular movement , the Jacobites, where wheel

engraving dates from the 1740s and some diamond

point engraving on personal glasses from the early 18th
Figure 2.

Blue serving bottle, engraved with the

Arms of the `Antients’, second half of the 18th century
(GL).

century, the absence of earlier Masonic glass is all the
more surprising.

It seems likely that early Freemasonry had very strict

views on the degree of secrecy that should be observed,

and that this extended to the written word, advertising

and to the engraving of glass. This seems to have been
relaxed after about 1750, as a print of 1754′ (fig. 3)

shows a Master Mason figure made up of Masonic
emblems with a verse inscription. The first

advertisements for Masonic glass seem to be American,
dated 1761, and this series’ gives considerable detail of

the sort of wares on offer:

THE CLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 3.

Masonic caricature print of 1754

Figure 5.

Beilby firing glass, polychrome

(NGL)

Masonic enamelling, 1760s (Courtesy of Mr John

Brooks).

Figure 4.

Beilby firing glass, ‘Ancient Operative

Figure 6.

Beilby firing glass, white enamel,

Lodge, Dundee’ in white enamel, 1760s.

‘Temperance’, 1760s (GL).

(Photographed by kind permission of Christie’s).

THE GLASS

crRa-E
JOURNAL
8

Figure 7.

Beilby firing glass, white enamel,

Masonic emblems, diaper work, 1760s (AC).
Figure 9.

One ofa set of double series air twist glasses

engraved with emblems of Lodge Officers. Crossed keys

symbolising the Treasurer, circa 1760 (AC).

Figure S.

Masonic firing glasses enamelled in red

and white, not Beilby. 3rd quarter of 18th century

(GL).
Figure 10.

Opaque twist firing glass engraved

with emblems, circa 1770 (AC).

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 11. Opaque twist wine engraved with

emblems, circa 1770 (GL).
Figure 13.

Balustroid wine, circa 1730, engraved

in the 1790s (GL).

Figure 12.

Firing glass engraved with emblems,

short facet stem, circa 1780 (GL).
Figure 14

Firing glasses of Union Lodge, No 52,

Norwich (NGL).

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

1761: Engrav’d Free Mason glasses
1763: Curiously engrav’d with Mason’s arms

1769: Right Free-Masons

1771: Mason glasses engraved with the different
jewels with the hand and hand flower

1773: Royal Arch Mason Glasses

1774: Mason glasses engraved with the arms

1777: Freemasons, plain, engraved, sprigs and cut
shanks

1780: English Freemason wine glasses

1790: Truly Masonic heavy-bottomed wines, well
adapted in part to celebrate the ever
glorious St. Johns.

Although many of these glasses were imported from

Britain, some were probably made in America. A set of

straight sided small tumblers in the George Washington
Masonic National Memorial, Alexandria, Virginia,

must date from 1783-88 and although thought

probably to be English by the owners are of a form

uncommon here.’ However, the Bristol glassmakers

were supplying the New York glass merchant Frederick
Rhinelander with half-gill tumblers in 1779, which he
asked to have ‘very stout thick bottoms’. No mention

was made of engraving, though Rhinelander had sold
Masonic glasses in 1775, and it is possible that the

glasses were engraved in America.’

The first English glasses seem to come from the

1760s, as they are characterised by air and opaque twists

and Beilby decoration, and almost without exception

are firing glasses. There is no record of Beilby being a
Mason himself, but he undertook work for both English

and Scottish Lodges. Rush’ illustrates tumbler-shaped
firing glasses, one enamelled in superb colour with the

arms of the Grand Lodge of England and another in

white with emblems and ‘The Royal Arch Glasgow’ as

well as an opaque twist firing glass with ‘Ancient
Operative Lodge Dundee’ (fig. 4). Another Beilby glass

illustrates Masonic office — the key representing the
Lodge treasurer (fig. 5) — while another proclaims a

nominated Masonic virtue ‘Temperance’ (fig. 6), this

time with an air twist. A few Beilby opaque twist firing

glasses also survive with emblems but no inscription
(fig. 7), and these are distinguished by fine work and the

use of Beilby mannerisms such as diaper work from a

series of glasses enamelled more crudely in red and
white (fig. 8) of the same period but of uncertain
provenance.

A number of other glasses survive from this period.

Grant Francis’ illustrates a set of four wines with
double series air twists, each with the emblem of a

different office within a Lodge, which would appear to

date from the 1760-1770 period. A fifth one, apparently

from the same set, has come to light (fig. 9), again

decorated with the treasurer’s keys. Of the same period
is a finely engraved firing glass covered with emblems

(fig. 10), and an opaque twist wine (fig. 11), while a

facet stem firing glass (fig. 12) may be a little later.

Plain stem firing glasses are particularly difficult to

date, as few Lodges seem to have had emblems or a

Lodge number engraved on their glasses before about
1790 in England, and even when they are engraved, the

engraving may, and frequently has been, added at a
later date. However, in the Provincial Grand Lodge in

Norwich there is a set of four glasses on short plain

stems with firing feet, engraved with ‘Lodge No 103’.
Unity Lodge only existed between 1770 and 1780 and
this set of glasses would correspond with this period. A

fine balustroid wine (fig. 13) in Grand Lodge dates from

the 1740-50 period and is engraved with ‘Lodge No 7’.

The Tuscan Lodge had this number from 1755 until

1814, and the glass was in fact engraved by a Brother
Paas between 1796 and 1798. Two firing glasses (fig. 14)

are from Union Lodge in Norwich. They both have the
very thick base of early 19th century date, and the left

hand glass is numbered 68, the lodge number from

1814 to 1832. However, the right hand glass has the

present number, 52, which the Lodge did not acquire
until 1863, rather late for the glass itself. This glass has

then been acid-etched to celebrate the Lodge’s

bicentenary in 1936 !

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 15.

Firing glass, 3rd quarter of 18th

century of Bezaleel Select Lodge, No 179, engraving
probably later (GL).
Figure 17

Elaborately cut firing glass, circa 1820.

Foundation Lodge No 121 (GL).

Figure 16.

Firing glass, stem cut with vertical

flutes, circa 1800 (NGL).
Figure 18.

Masonic boot glass with notched verti-

cal flute cutting, circa 1800 (GL).

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

Firing glasses apparently came into fashion about

1720. Bernard Hughes” quotes a writer, D’Urfey, who
mentions ‘thumping glasses’ in 1719. Though baluster

stem glasses with recognisable firing feet are
conspicuously absent, some of the squatter baluster

glasses of the 1720 period have heavy plain feet which

would probably justify the description (cf the ‘Dolly
Mytton’ glass illustrated in Bles,u) and a variety of dram

with a strongly waisted bowl resting directly on a heavy
disc foot could date from 1730. Some of these have
Jacobite engraving putatively of the 1740s, and they

appear in contemporary engravings, notably Hogarth’s

The Rake’s Progress’. Firing (rapping the glass on the

table to make a sound resembling a volley of musketry)

and ceremonial toasting with a ‘three times three’ seem
to have been widespread until the end of the 18th

century, and as they virtually only survive in masonry

now, a description of the procedure follows.

Firing in masonry varies from Lodge to Lodge, and

this suggests that there must have been considerable

variation originally. Each Lodge gives its own name to
its own fire, so that firing in my Lodge will be described

as ‘United Friends’ fire’. The brethren stand and take

time from an experienced member. A firing glass
(nowadays empty, the toast itself being drunk from

another glass at the conclusion of the fire) is pointed
forwards and then to the left and right, while saying

‘point, left, right’ three times. We then say ‘one, two’,
banging the glass on the table on the count of three.

This is then followed by three handclaps, repeated three

times. The person or persons being toasted are then
named and the toast drunk. I think it likely that in

former times firing would have been done with a full

glass, emptied at each toast, which must have entailed

much spillage and a degree of inebriation incompatible

with present day motoring law !
I now turn to a survey of the the development of the

form and engraving of the firing glass. Beilby used both
the small waisted tumbler and also twist stem firing

glasses, so we know that the two shapes were in use
during the 1760s. By the 1770s plain stem glasses with

ogee bowls were being used by the other enamel

decorator (see fig. 8), and quite a number of plain

short-stem glasses engraved with emblems but no
Lodge number survive which stylistically date from the

latter half of the 18th century. Grant Francis’

illustration 10 also shows a plain stem firing glass

engraved with the arms of the premier Grand Lodge

(the ‘Moderns’) of this period. Lodge numbers do not

seem to have been engraved before about 1790, but
even when they do appear the glass itself may well be

earlier (fig. 15), so it is best to assess the dates of the

glass and the engraving separately.

The 1790-1820 period was characterised by an

increased use of cutting and of new and sometimes

elaborate forms. Fig. 16 has vertical flute cutting , and
Fig. 17 shows the use of elaborate cutting with

decanter-like neck rings of c. 1820. Fig. 18 shows a boot

glass with notched vertical flutes, the upper part of

which is covered with masonic emblems.

I have already detailed the use of the miniature

waisted tumbler by Beilby during the 1760s. For some

unknown reason — perhaps durability — the form does

not seem to have been used again during the latter part
of the century, there being seemingly a preference for

stem glasses with firing feet. The waisted tumbler
reappears around 1800 with a much heavier base and

more pronounced waisting of the bowl, the pontil mark

ground off on most glasses. Lodges appear to have

adopted the form very rapidly, and added the square

and compasses over the Lodge number to identify the
Lodge property. Fig. 19 shows a fine example of this

type, belonging to the Philanthropic Lodge at King’s

Lynn. This Lodge was founded in 1810 and acquired the
number on the glass (124) in 1832. It had a period of
prosperity during the 1830s, and we can be fairly sure

that the glasses still possessed by the Lodge were

acquired and engraved during this decade.

By the mid-19th century the degree of waisting on the

glass might be less pronounced, the base was not so
thick and the colour whiter than before. This is well

shown by two glasses from the Lodge of United Friends
at Yarmouth (fig. 20), which also show the use of Lodge

numeration. The Lodge records show that in 1860, nine

shillings were paid to the Northumberland Glass

Company for two dozen Masonic glasses. In 1896

Figure 20.

Firing glasses, Lodge of United Friends,

Great Yarmouth, 1840s and 1860s (UFL).

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 19.

Firing glass, Philanthropic Lodge,

King’s Lynn, 1830s (PL).
Figure 21.

Firing glass, Perseverance Lodge, No

213, circa 1870 (NGL).

Figure 22.

Firing glass, no emblems, engraved

Tccieston Lodge, No. 1624, A.D. 1876′ (AC).

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Brother Spelman’s health was drunk for presenting

sixteen firing glasses originally belonging to the Lodge.
The Lodge was prosperous from its foundation in 1797

until about 1840. However it had a spell of poor

attendance and did not meet at all for some years

during the 1850s, before revival in 1860.

It seems likely that the glasses with the thicker base

that survive were the glasses rediscovered in 1896, and
that they had been bought before 1840. The glasses

bought in 1860 are whiter in colour and less thick in the
base. But both remaining sets are engraved with the

present Lodge number (313) which was not acquired
until 1863, and furthermore are engraved with the

Lodge number distinctly differently — the later ones all
have the number 3 engraved as an almost closed off

square in the lower half of the number. So what
happened ? The only reasonable explanation is that the
Lodge bought glasses in 1860 and had them engraved in

1863, when the new and final Lodge number was
acquired. The rediscovered glasses must originally have

been plain, and were engraved in 1896 on rediscovery
to prevent their being lost and to match the existing set.

It is important to realise that Lodges were allowed to

change their number prior to 1863, usually though not

invariably acquiring a smaller number than before. This

process ceased in 1863, and since then, Lodges have
kept their number unchanged. This means that glasses

engraved for Lodges before 1863 may not have their
present lodge number on them and, as we have seen,

Lodges may well have had older glasses engraved with

the present Lodge number at a later date. The only

certainty is that the engraved number was correct when
the engraving was done.

The waisted tumbler shape persisted and examples

exist into the present century, but around 1870 a new

shape appeared, a solid bulbous base with a funnel bowl
arising from it (fig. 21). The evidence for this date is
twofold. Firstly, no glass of this shape has enumeration

preceding 1863 (the example shown bears the number

acquired by the Lodge of Perseverance at that date), and

secondly, there is the comment by Hartshorne in 1897
that the old form seemed ‘likely to be supplanted by a
new form of short glass, with a heavy flattened bulb as a

base’.’ Fig 22 shows one dated 1876, and fig. 23 a taller

20th century derivative. Specimens with high quality

cutting and engraving exist (fig. 24) and this form of

glass is still by far the commonest in use.

I now turn to the only other form of decorated

Masonic glass occurring in any numbers from the 18th

century — the decanter. I have already described a rare

blue decanter of c. 1770, and engraved decanters of late
18th century form occur, usually of mallet or tapering
form. These will often be generously decorated with

symbols, either all over or in panels. In the early 19th
century the tapering form gave way to the Prussian

shape with neck rings, and this is the commonest form
to be seen. While the relatively uncommon 18th

century decanters appear to have been Lodge property,

19th century ones are not infrequently engraved for
individual masons and must have been personal

property — probably being presented to or ordered by

the individual to commemorate initiation or becoming

Master. Fig. 25 shows a fine magnum tapering decanter
of the late 18th century, which can be dated with fair
certainty to 1790-1800, as it is decorated by William

Absolon of Yarmouth. The lettering is quite typical of
his work and the panel with the head of George HI
occurs on known Yarmouth glasses and matches them
exactly. The other side (fig. 26) is profusely engraved

with emblems and the inscription ‘May Brotherly Love
Continue.’

There seems little to go on in seeking identification, but
the
History of Freemasonry in Norfolk
gives us a due.’

The Lodge of Unity was founded in Norwich in 1747,
and moved to Yarmouth in 1791. It met at the King’s

Head Inn in the market place from 1799 until 1804. At

that period, Lodges were usually known by the name of
the inn they met in, and records of 1799 refer to it as the

`King’s Head Lodge’. In 1800 the Master presented

three bottles of wine to the Lodge to drink his son’s
health, and we know that the Lodge was both

prosperous and wine drinking, as in 1809 they were
charging visiting brethren 4s 6d or a bottle of wine for

the evening’s entertainment. It seems almost certain

that a decanter thus decorated belonged to

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 23.

Firing glass, early 20th century.

Probably one of a set purchased in 1907 for one

shilling each (UFL).

Figure 24.

Firing glass with elaborate cutting, late

19th century (NGL).
Figure 25

Magnum decanter, circa 1800,

engraved by Wm Absolon Jnr of Great Yarmouth,

probably for the ‘King’s Head Lodge’ (Lodge of Unity,
GL).

Figure 26.

Magnum decanter, circa 1800,

engraved by Wm Absolon Jnr of Great Yarmouth,
probably for the ‘King’s Head Lodge’ (Lodge of Unity,
GL).

Figure 27.

Masonic decanter engraved John

Bloom Yarmouth’, circa 1809
(AC).
THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

them. Occasionally decanters can be dated from the
inscription if this commemorates a particular person or

event. Fig. 27 shows a decanter with emblems and ‘John
Bloom Yarmouth’. The records of the Lodge of United
Friends No. 313 show that he was a Mariner aged 28,

resident in Yarmouth, who was admitted on 8

September 1809.’s

The emblems appearing on Masonic glass are of a

Figure 28.

Pair of Masonic rummers, moulded
variety of different kinds and a list of the commonest

domed square feet, engraved with emblems, circa
may be helpful in identification. In addition to those

1800 (PL).
During the 19th century Masonry assumed a more

public face. Masonic processions accompanied
celebrations, particularly those concerned with the
inauguration or completion of public buildings. This

process was accompanied by a great increase in the size

and variety of Masonic glass, much of which was now
obviously intended to be presented to individuals
rather than used by the Lodge. Rummers, sometimes of

extraordinary size, were profusely decorated with

emblems (figs. 28-30). As well as individual initials or

dedications, the inscriptions might include quotations

from Masonic songs (fig. 31 — ‘May we meet upon the
Level and part upon the Square’). One puzzle is what

appears to be a stirrup cup (fig. 32) decorated with

square and compasses. A rare Masonic lampshade (fig.
33) is known to predate 1851, as the Lodge which now

owns it acquired it when the Lodge originally owning it

was erased at that date. It originally depicted the three

Masonic degree emblems and Faith, Hope and Charity.

It is not uncommon to find Continental Masonic

glass in England. Fig. 34 shows a typical Bohemian
form, and these often occur with characteristic overlay

in red. It should be remembered that glass of

continental origin might well have been decorated in
this country. Fig. 35 shows a thin opaque white tankard

with Masonic decoration which one might well assume
to be Continental both in manufacture and decoration.

However, the Victoria and Albert Museum has a similar
tankard with Masonic decoration signed by AbsoIon of

Yarmouth, who also decorated this form of tankard in
other ways — the Norwich Museum displays another
commemorating the Dereham Cavalry in 1803 or 1805.

I I.

.•

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 29.

Bucket bowl rummer engraved with

emblems, circa 1810-20 (RMA).

Figure 30.

Large rummer engraved with emblems,

circa 1840 (PL).
Figure 31.

Massive
rummer
with air twist stem.

`We meet upon the Level and part upon the Square.’
(GL).

Figure 32.

Amethyst stirrup(?) glass engraved

with Square and Compasses. 19th century (GL).

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 33.

Hexagonal Masonic Lantern (PL).

Figure 34.

Continental Masonic glass. Probably

Bohemian, 2nd half of 19th century (RMA).
listed here, there may be emblems which either relate to

one of the additional degrees of Freemasonry, or which
may arise from foreign Freemasonry or from other

organisations which also use some of the emblems.

These last will either be recognisable from their
emblems or because the name of the Order is engraved

on the glass, e g The Independent Order of Foresters.

1)
Architectural. Pillars, surmounted with

celestial/terrestrial globes, sometimes joined by an

arch. Squared pavement. Altar with candlesticks.
Throne with King Solomon, seated. Winding

staircase.

2)
Working tools of Masonry. Square. Compasses.

24″ ruler. Level. Plumb Rule. Trowel. Gavel. Chisel.

Skirrit. Pencil.

3)
Insignia of Office. Square/Compasses conjoined.

Level. Plumb Rule. Keys and Quill Pens (single or

two crossed).

4)
Celestial bodies. Sun. Moon. Stars (usually seven

in number).

5)
Other emblems. Open Bible. Coffin with skull

and crossbones and other emblems. Hand (or
hands shaking). All-seeing eye. Sprigs of acacia,

sometimes with stylised flowers.

It may be helpful to give some idea of the sources

available to a collector or curator when trying to trace
the origin of an inscribed glass or when in doubt about

the symbolism displayed. Masonry is organised at three

levels — the United Grand Lodge of England (in Great

Queen Street, London), Provincial Grand Lodges
(which usually correspond geographically to counties),

and individual Lodges. United Grand Lodge has a most

comprehensive collection of English Masonic glass in
its museum, which is open to the public, and the

curators can access the library which, in addition to
reference works carries records of Masonic Lodges

(membership and attendance) from the earliest times.
Provincial Grand Lodges will usually be found in the

County city or town. They will usually have a library

with detailed references about Lodges in that county,

and may well have a museum. Individual Lodges will
have details of individual members and attendance and

the older Lodges will often have records which go back

to their foundation and may have a written Lodge
history with information about Lodge property,

including glass. In a town where a number of Lodges
meet at Masonic rooms, the rooms may also have a

small museum or display of local masonic objects.

While Masonic secrets exist, which Masons have an

obligation to keep, the vast majority of information is

not secret and Masonic curators and Lodge secretaries

will be happy to assist enquirers, particularly as there is

always a possibility that a glass represents an unknown
or lost aspect of Lodge history.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 35.

Tankard in milchglass enamelled with

emblems, circa 1800 (GL).

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

NOTES

1.
Robert F Gould,
The History of Freemasonry

(London, 1887), pp 36-46, 299 et seq.

2.
The Holy Bible,
Kings 1, Chapters 5-7.

3.
Robert F Gould,
op cit,

p 328.

4.
The Holy Bible,

Ezekiel, Chapters 1-2. The four

figures also represent the Tetramorph (the four

Evangelists).

5.
A Free Mason form’d out of the materials of the

lodge. Published August 15th 1754 by W. Tringham

in Castle Alley, Royal Exchange.
(In the Provincial

Grand Lodge of Norfolk, Norwich).

6.
Helen McKearin,

Eighteenth Century

Advertisements of Glass Imports into the Colonies

and United States
(1954-5). Arthur Churchill,

Glass Notes,
No 14, pp 13-21; No 15, pp 15-25.

7.
The Glass Club Bulletin
(National Early American

Glass Club, Fall, 1989).

8.
C Witt, C Weeden, A P Schwind,

Bristol Glass

(Bristol, 1984) pp 74-83.

9.
J Rush, A
Beilby Odyssey

(Nelson and Saunders,

1987), figs. 61-2.

10.
Grant Francis,

Old English Drinking Glasses

(London, 1926), Nos 306-7, 309-10.

11.
G B Hughes,
English, Scottish and Irish Table Glass

(London, 1956) p 228.

12.
J Bles,
Rare English Glasses of the 17th and 18th

Centuries
(Privately printed, 1924), fig. 87, p 166.

13.
A Hartshorne,
Old English Glasses
(1897), p 323.

14.
Hamon le Strange,
History of Freemasonry in

Norfolk
(Norwich, 1896), pp 39-43.

15.
R H Teasdel,
The History of United Friends

Lodge…1797 to 1930
(Great Yarmouth, 1930).
Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the co-operation of the

secretaries, brethren and stewards of the Provincial
Grand Lodge of Norfolk; the Philanthropic Lodge,
King’s Lynn; the Lodge of United Friends, Great

Yarmouth; the Royal Masonic Assembly Rooms, Great

Yarmouth, and the other Norfolk Lodges who were
kind enough to reply to my enquiries. I am grateful to

Christie’s for permission to photograph fig. 4 and to

John Brooks for fig. 5. I am particularly grateful to the
Board of General Purposes of the United Grand Lodge

of England for permission to photograph and use

many of the illustrations in this article, and also to
John Hamill, Librarian and Curator, for invaluable

assistance and advice.

NB Abbreviations used in the captions to
illustrations

GL:

United Grand Lodge of England

PL:

Philanthropic Lodge, King’s Lynn

NGL:

Provincial Grand Lodge of Norfolk

AC:

Author’s Collection

UFL:

Lodge of United Friends, Great

Yarmouth

RMA:

Royal Masonic Assembly Rooms,

Great Yarmouth.

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THE GLASS CIRCLE LOURNAL

Falcon Bottle Glass House, circa 1710. RG Bendrey,1994.

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL S

Roy Bendrey

THE FALCON BRICK CONE
GLASS HOUSE

THE OTHER REVOLUTION OF 1688

A paper read to the Circle on 16 February
1995

The unique all-brick cone-shaped glasshouse is

universally accepted as ‘arriving’ in the latter half of the

17th century. That such a dominant piece of

architecture within a landscape, and so important a
contribution to the development of English

glassmaking, should arrive unnoted is a mystery. The

basic utility and characteristic shape was retained for a
remarkable three hundred years, yet the invention was

not patented. Why? Perhaps this account will answer
the question.

Construction of the first cone glasshouse seems to

have been in the tiny parish of Christ Church, Surrey, in

the year of the Great Revolution of 1688. There, located

close to the south bank of the Thames, on the opposite

side of the river from Blackfriars Stairs, embryonic

industrialisation was created, seventy years before the

birth of the so-called ‘industrial revolution’. Uniquely

combining a structure that controlled and maximised

draught, the better to achieve a melting temperature at
the furnace, it was at the same time a new working

environment. Glassmakers worked inside the cone and

around a circular furnace that was free-standing within.
When doors and windows were shut, externally vented

tunnels led to the heart of the furnace where air was

introduced to the coal fuel. The resultant smoke, flames
and sparks issued freely from the furnace into the space

within the fireproof cone and were drawn up and out of
the top. Until that time the secrets of foreign

glassmakers and their English-born sons had practically
created and maintained the industry, albeit with some
English masters. The new invention enabled the English

glass trade to further promote and extend the
considerable advantage over foreign competition

achieved by George Ravenscroft when he discovered a

successful formula for making lead crystal in 1676.

Francis Jackson, builder of the cone, was born at

Bridgnorth, Shropshire, in 1659.
1
The family had

survived the Civil War on the Royalist side and were
established burgesses of that town well into the 18th

century. His father held land and property at King’s

Lynn, Norfolk, including glasshouses, and owned ships

that probably supplied Lynn sand to the London glass

trade! With confident Royalist connections Jackson set

out to exploit the wealthy London market, and learned

of vacant glasshouses and building land along Bankside

in Southwark. The sites were at the western boundary

of the Bishop of Winchester’s estate, where two

furnaces were set up (fig.1). There is some evidence that

a glasshouse already existed on old garden ground that

accessed through an alley off Willow Street at the

western end of the celebrated Bankside in the ancient

Liberty of the Clink, by the present Royal Watercolour

Society Gallery.’ The other glasshouse was a similar

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THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure I.

Rocque’s Map of 1746 showing the

Glass Houses. The Falcon Inn was at the head of

Faulcon Lane, by Faulcon Stairs. The later Green and

Pellat Glass Works was located in the triangle formed
by the Green Walk, Gravel Lane and Hopton’s

Almshouses, over Jackson’s Court. The Round Bottle

Glass House is on the left, in Upper Ground, opposite

the Coal Wharf The Cockpit joined pair can be seen

exiting through Cockpit Court into Gravel Lane and

into Willow Street. The general road layout and

Hopton’s Almshouses remain as circa 1746.

timber-framed building formerly used as a Cockpit,

abutting the Willow Street glasshouse at the back end,

whose owner was induced to leave.’ Access to that
building was through Cockpit Alley on to Gravel Lane,

an ancient road that led away south from the river and

coaching inn which formed a boundary between the

parishes of St Saviour’s, Southwark, and Christ Church,
Surrey. The pair were advertised as the Cockpit

glasshouses, one of which produced ‘all sorts of the best

and finest drinking-glasses and curious glasses for
ornament.’
5

Less than one hundred yards west along the river

bank a revolutionary cone-shaped all-brick glasshouse

was built by Jackson especially to manufacture bottles

and associated glassware. Between stood the Falcon Inn
which gave its name to this group of glasshouses into

the 20th century. The site seems to have been on or

about the remains of the Swan playhouse as shown on a
map of the Paris Garden Manor in 1627, at the eastern

end of a raised river-bank causeway known as Upper

Ground, and between that and a parallel track known as
Holland’s Leaguer.’ Shakespeare is said to have

performed at the newly-built Swan in the autumn of
1596. During the Commonwealth period the
playhouses were closed and allowed to fall into

disrepair. Cromwell also had all the bear-pit animals

shot and the necks of the Cockpit fighting birds were

wrung. The solid circular base of the old Swan would
have provided raised foundations suitable for the new
round glasshouse where the hinterland was subject to

regular winter flooding.

Construction of this unique building was unheralded

and recorded only through the complaints of the local
washerwomen who used the airy water meadows
behind the river bank for washing and drying the very

dirty and coal-smoked clothing of the citizens of the

crowded City. In good citizens’ houses with gardens,

clothes and household linen were washed once a

month. Servants in Samuel Pepys’ household were up at

two o’clock in the morning on washdays and hard at it

until the evening. Those without gardens or servants

had their clothes collected by the South Bank

washerwomen or remained dirty. State Papers

Domestic of 12 August to King James II, with reference

to the Attorney General, requested ‘to hear all parties

concerned, of the petition of the inhabitants of the
parish of Christ Church, Co Surrey, showing that they

are informed that one John Straw and others are
erecting glasshouses in the middle of the parish to the
utter ruin of many of the inhabitants whose livelihood

THE GLASS CIRCLE /01JRNAL

depends upon washing and to the annoyance of several

gentlemen who have laid out large sums of money upon
their gardens for health and recreation, and praying his

Majesty to put a stop to the erection of such glasshouses
till they be heard.’ Needless to say, they were not heard.

The King was more concerned with nonsense talk of
`warming pans’ than washerwomen. Straw was a

working partner at the Falcon, whilst Jackson’s father
oversaw the Lynn glassmaking activities, a brother the

retailing and another sailor brother, the shipping.

A Catholic heir to James II’s throne had been

announced to an anxious Protestant population on 10
June 1688, and mobs roamed the streets of London

after William of Orange landed with his invasion force

in November. Across the City, scaffolding shrouded

many of Wren’s church towers and the similarly clad
cathedral was years from completion. Few spires had

then been built. Excepting the local petitioners, the
brick cone rising on the South Bank would hardly have

attracted a glance as it occasionally poked a smoky nose

through the low river fogs and smogs of old London.’
James II fled the kingdom in December of that fateful

year and a very cold winter followed.

Adjoining the parish of Christ Church, created in

1671 from the larger parish of St Saviours, stood
Winchester House, the former London residence of the

Bishops of Winchester, which had been annexed by

Henry VIII. A glassmaking furnace had been set up in

the old Brewhouse in 1614.’ Samuel Hutchinson, a
glassmaker and former ironmonger and Citizen of

London, occupied the site in 1688,
9
and was succeeded

there by his former associate, Francis Jackson.’ The
excellence of that furnace had been acknowledged for

many years.” Reverberatory glassmaking furnaces were

far in advance of those for other metals’ and the

situation was recognised by Hutchinson. On 10

September 1676 he applied for a ‘patent for 14 years for
his invention of melting down lead ore and other

minerals into lead and other minerals with sea coals or
pit coals.’ State Papers Domestic of 1 October 1676

show that he was successful but unwilling or unable to

develop it further. In 1686 the patent was declared void

by the Privy Council. Perhaps Hutchinson failed to
recognise the importance of chimney induced draught

for the furnace to reach smelting temperatures ? With

an understanding of the technicalities of the glass

furnace, Jackson was able to plan and build the new

glasshouse. Undaunted by misfortunes, Hutchinson

sought a patent for a street light and developed it with a
man called Edmund Heming, who had set up some

lights in and around Dublin Castle (for which he had

sought a patent) but who had been obliged to flee in the
fateful year of 1688.” Back in London, Heming renewed

former acquaintances and met Francis Jackson. They

formed a partnership to develop and seek a patent for a

Jackson light design of ‘one entire light’, in a company
called Lights Royale.’
4
After the signing of the Articles of

Limerick, Heming’s interest turned once more to

Dublin. With fresh capital from the sale of Lights
Royale, he returned there circa 1692-3.
15

Intense heat required to fuse glass brought an ever-

present danger of fire in soot-clogged timber-roofed

glasshouses, which was considered an acceptable hazard

of the trade well into the 18th century.’ Contemporary

opinion held that only the thick stone walls of the

abandoned monastery of mendicant Crutched Friars,

where Jacob Verzelini had a glassmaking furnace in
1575, prevented an earlier Great Fire of London. It

destroyed 40,000 billets of fuel wood, along with stock

and his livelihood.” Following the Great Fire of London

in 1666, a rebuilding commission was announced and

Charles II appointed Sir Christopher Wren as one of

the Commissioners. The Rebuilding Act of 1667
forbade half-timbered buildings. New buildings were to

be of brick or stone to the satisfaction of building
inspectors. The Great Fire of Southwark in 1676, when

500 homes were brought to smouldering ruins brought

strong recommendations for brick or stone walls. The

unique ingredients needed to create a fire-proof

glasshouse were brought together in the summer of

1688. They included motivation, markets, money and

imagination. Although clever enough to imagine such
an environment with enough capital to risk such an
undertaking, Jackson or any contemporary glassmaker

would not have had the knowledge or technical ability
to design such a huge and complicated piece of

innovative structural engineering entirely of brick. But

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THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 2.

View of London and Westminster by

Jan Kip, circa 1710.

he knew a man who did have all of those qualifications

and some more — the only British architect universally

acknowledged as a genius.

That the existence of the Falcon Bottle Glass Cone

had for long remained known but unnoticed is not

particularly surprising, as no cone or round references

have yet been found. Visually it was very obvious, as it

broke clear through the jumbled roof-line of

warehouses and domestic buildings to belch a never-
ending plume of smoke from the chimney mouth at a
probable height of a hundred feet. When W H Maitland

reviewed the parish of ‘Christ’s Church’ in 1756 for his

History of London,
he was impressed by ‘a very large

Glass-house, for making of Bottles’ on the tiny Falcon

site, whilst merely noting that there were 3 glasshouses
at Vauxhall, which was an extensive site of around 9

acres, whose actual glasshouses measured over 16,000

square feet super.

The cone is shown in a large number of

contemporary landscape drawings, paintings, prints

and maps, of which the earliest seems to be the View of

Westminster and the City in 1710 by the Dutch-born
engraver, Jan Kip, who lived at Westminster (fig. 2). He

was known to be ‘not over-curious in his manner’ as

evidenced by the spikily drawn cone that towers above
the trees and buildings of the Thames’s southern bank,

within the panorama. The number ‘100’ refers to
`Glasshouse’. On a rare copy of the 1755 Stow’s Survey

for Lambeth and Christ Church parish the cone shape is

clearly defined (fig. 3). There the number ’38’ refers to
`Glas House’ A note on the border records that it was

`Taken from ye last Survey with Corrections.’ So the

cone depiction may have dated from John Strype’s

Figure 3.

Detail of Stowe’s Survey, showing cone

shape Glasshouse (38).

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Survey version of 1720. The cone device was not used
for any other London glasshouse. Other curious

depictions of the cone come from a number of Frost

Fair handbills from the severe winter of 1739-40 (figs. 4-

5). The scenes are
of
tented encampments with stalls set

up on the frozen river Thames, whose backgrounds are

almost invariably of a row of naive toybox houses and
the smoking Falcon. Engravings were quickly produced

for the unexpected and ephemeral event that was of no

further interest come the thaw. There was no need to

engrave a complex view of the City when a shapeless

but unmistakable beacon of the Falcon glasshouse was

recognisable by all Londoners.

Fire insurance societies, encouraged by effective

London building regulations, operated from the end of

the 17th century. Records of the Hand in Hand

Insurance Society reveal that in 1715 the Jackson family

insured their large and growing portfolio of
properties:
9
The cone is there revealed by omission.

Every outbuilding, warehouse, store, stable, wash-

house, the Three Nags ale-house (an essential
glassworker amenity), tenement and dwelling house is

meticulously recorded adjoining and by the Bottle Glass

House, but the actual ‘glasshouse’ is not recorded. The
Hand in Hand Insurance Society insured the nearby

timber-framed Cockpit glasshouses and ancillary
buildings. The solution to the mystery was found in the

policy documents. The Society insured all types of

property, from domestic to industrial, with the

exception of property
not
subject to fire risk, or

occupied by an unacceptable hazardous trade. The new

glasshouse cone was not subject to fire risk because it
was constructed entirely of brick. Timber-framed

glasshouses were insurable, brick cones were not.

There is no documentary evidence to support a

theory that Sir Christopher Wren was the designer of

the Falcon cone. Yet a brick cone of his design, of

glasshouse proportions, exists and heroically serves its

purpose after almost 300 years. Wren was first of all a

scientist who developed an experimental process of
learning with
a
group of like men who later founded the

Royal Society. He had an extraordinary talent for

mathematics and astronomy, and an interest in
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geometry, combined with an enormous interest in
engineering and the techniques of building. The Royal

Society, of
which he was to become President, had a

scientific interest in glassmaking as well as in glass
products for experimental work. His friend, the diarist

Professor Robert Hooke, himself a Fellow of the Society

and nominated Commissioner for drafting the

Rebuilding Act of 1667, recorded a glasshouse visit
with

Wren on 29 July 1673.
20
Great quantities of window

Figure 5.

A Frost Fair cone depiction

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

glass were used in the new churches and glassmakers
would surely have been among his acquaintances. The

Falcon was an unusual glass supplier to St Paul’s in

1706 when they delivered 40 half-cases of Crown glass,

and 10 cases of the same in the summer of 1710, with
`Watridge’ [Waterage] added to the price.’ Individual

Crowns, averaging 30 inches in diameter, were packed
24 to a case.

The Rebuilding Act of 1670, which increased the tax

on coal shipped to London, was intended to finance the

rebuilding of the City churches and of St Paul’s. The

greatest individual consumers of coal, and therefore the
highest tax payers, were glasshouses, foundries and

brewhouses. Their combination of sulphurous fumes
insidiously eroded the facades of the new churches and

cathedral even as one tax-paid stone was laid upon

another.

Construction of the Cathedral had reached a stage by

1688 where the huge edifice was apparent from

numerous horizons, and its prospect could not be

better appreciated than from the Bankside. From there

Wren could study the perspective of the developing
cathedral and contemplate the future dome, which he

was expressly told must be ‘conspicuous above the
Figure 6.

Sectional view of the dome of St Paul’s

Cathedral, London.

houses.’ Blackfriars Stairs was a convenient ferry
crossing point from the City to the Falcon Stairs and

Inn, where a number of its 29 commodious rooms

could have provided a comfortable and convivial river-

side prospect of his masterpiece. Samuel Pepys
recorded familiarity with the inn and the ladies he took

there for discreet amorous interludes.

The basic specification for a cone-shaped brick

structure would have been understood instinctively by

Wren, who, had he been involved, would simply have
intructed bricklayers on-site and in progress. He was an

inventor who appears sometimes to have solved
problems up on the scaffolding of his buildings, but his

real genius lay in the fact that they were solved before a

brick or stone was laid. The cone commissioner would

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 7.

Detail of Henry Bell’s ‘Groundplat of King’s Lyn’, 1680. ‘The Glashouse’ (17).

have been unaware that his glorious glasshouse might

well have been used as an extended trial by Wren to

solve one of his greatest problems, the solution of which
is regarded as one of the engineering achievements of

the world.

His greatest building is without doubt the cathedral,

and the dome rising majestically above is the crowning
glory. On that portion of this superb building does his
enduring fame as a structural engineer rest. To be
`conspicuous above the houses’ the dome was raised

above a cylinder-shaped colonnade. To counteract the
effect of the inside of a chimney from within the

cathedral, a shallow inner dome was created to restore a
balanced visual appearance. His enduring fame as a

structural engineer rests on how he was able to build
and support the double domes and lantern with their
estimated weight of 67,000 tons (fig. 6).
The iron-worker Jean Tijou was instructed to forge a

giant chain of lead-sheathed wrought iron rods, formed

from eight one-inch bars welded together at the ends,
that hooked into rings and were laid in a channel cut
into the stone to reinforce the point where the inner

dome was to spring from the cylindrical stage. The
inner dome was begun in 1705 and proceeded to the

construction of the unseen giant Brick Cone which was
to support the crowning glory of dome and lantern.

During the following year and into 1707, the master

bricklayer Richard Billingshurst engaged an average of

37 men on the brickwork of inner dome and cone,

reducing the numbers as the cone diameter decreased.

Then the completed cone was handed over to the

masons to form the stone lantern that is now seen

emerging from the supported leaded timber dome.

Billingshurst was first engaged on brick vaulting at St

Paul’s in September 1688, as the Falcon cone took
form.”

For those who would enjoy one of the finest views in

London from the lantern balcony, there is an added
pleasure of ascending to it between the hidden brick

cone and the timber dome. Rows of stone corbels jut
from the cone with wrought iron straps that secure and

support the huge oak frame of the dome.” At

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Figure 8.

Detail from Henry Bell’s view of Lynn

from the west, circa 1710. The dome-shaped building

shown as ‘H’ is the glasshouse.

approximately 105 feet high it is of average height for a
glasshouse. The tallest recorded was one of 150 feet at
Belfast.” Reminiscent of the St Paul’s cone is the 100

foot high and 60 feet wide redundant listed Redhouse

glasshouse at Wordsley, near Stourbridge, built around

1788,” which seems to share that delightfully subtle

convex cone form.

Before arriving in London, the Jackson family were

based at King’s Lynn, where bottles were made in

certain high-roofed former monastic buildings of the

surrounding old Augustine and Blackfriars areas. One
of them is shown as ‘The Glashouse’ in Henry Bell’s

`Groundplat of King’s Lynn’ dated 1680 (figs.
7 &

13).

His view of Lynn from the west,
circa

1710 (fig. 8), is

much more accomplished and shows a new-built

glasshouse, marked ‘H’, with a roof outline similar to a

contemporary Wren church, or even the dome of St

Paul’s where the last stone of the lantern had been laid

two years before. That same glasshouse is the curious

onion-domed depiction seen in Rastrick’s
Figure 9.

Detail from Rastrick’s Ichnographia of

King’s Lynn, 1725. The round glasshouse (cone?)

with ancillary buildings is shown above the curve of

Spinner Lane (18).

`lchnographia’ of 1725, marked ’18’ above the curve in

Spinner Lane (figs. 9 & 14). The former glasshouse on
the site was given over as a Meeting Place (chapel) in

April 1693,
26
whilst the new glassmaking structure

continued in use for many years. The general
Blackfriars area, indicated by the `G’ in the space within

the enclosure of `Milkyard’, together with ‘Dovecote’

and a property called the ‘Fryars’, next to the ‘former
glasshouse’ used by the Presbyterians, was leased to

Gilbert Dixon, glassmaker, of Dudley in

Worcestershire, in 1726.”

Can any connection between the Falcon cone, the

strange Lynn structure, and Wren be dismissed as
coincidental ? Was the Lynn cone/dome, built before

1693, a model to test ideas prior to the construction of

the cathedral dome, financed by and to serve ‘the sixth
insatiable sense’ (Carlyle) of the vanity of Francis

Jackson who, during the boom years of 1681-95, ‘made

money hand over fist’?” The use of study models of

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 10.

Detail from The Thames and St Paul’s

Cathedral from Richmond House’ by Canaletto,

painted in 1747.

various parts of the cathedral was common practice at
the time. Two masons were employed for almost two

months in 1691 making a model of one quarter of the
projected St Paul’s dome.”

A celebrated picture of The Thames and St Paul’s

Cathedral from Richmond House by Canaletto

(Antonio Giovani Canal), painted in 1747, shows the

view from the window of the Dining Room of
Richmond House and represents one of the many

occasions when the Duke of Richmond entertained his

guests at the riverside. Having left Venice for the fresh

pastures of England in 1746, Canaletto was viewing the

scene for the first time and drew with the usual

meticulous care which had epitomised his famous

Venetian views. The red brick cone shape located on the
south ipank of the Thames may have been a church spire
for all he knew (fig. 10). By using the Camera Obscura,
Figure 11.

Depiction of Dublin Round Glass

House from advertisement dated 1751.

in use in Italy by the end of the sixteenth century, he

drew what he saw, amid the black and white forest of

church towers and spires, and placed each with a degree

of accuracy that could not be faulted with a theodolite.
This magnificent Canaletto, which gives high honour to

the greatest cone glasshouse ever built, can be viewed at

the country home of the Dukes of Richmond and

Gordon, at Goodwood House, near Chichester.

A fascinating story of an early glasshouse cone (fig.

11) was recorded in the
Dublin Chronicle
for 11-13

September 1788, some time after it had been pulled
down.'” Captain Philip Roche, a Roman Catholic who,

by being included in the Articles of Limerick, 1691, had
preserved his estate and then spent some years on the

Continent, where he was supposed to have acquired the

mystery of making flint glass. Returning to Dublin, he

first set up ‘on a small scale’, then projected extensive

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The South West Prospect of London, 1750, by T Bowles.

THE GLASS CIRCLE fOLIRNAL 8

and ‘convenient works at Mary’s Lane’, where the

structures ‘twice fell to the ground when nearly
completed.’ The third and last attempt was successful

and remained unimpaired until pulled down in 1787.

The second collapse of the glasshouse was vividly
recorded in the parish records of St Michan’s for March

1696-7, where the burial register stated that seven
persons were burnt to death or killed at the glasshouse.

Roche is said to have been buried in the fall but

survived. Written some 90 years after its construction,
it must be concluded that there are some errors in the

account, especially of the second collapse ‘when nearly
completed.’ For persons to be ‘burnt to death’, the

furnace would have been in operation and the cone

complete. The earliest actual reference to its shape was
in a Lloyds News Letter of October 1713, which referred

to the ‘Round Glass House’.

A connection of the Falcon and Dublin cones might

have occurred through the Lights Royale collaboration

of Jackson and Heming. No doubt the latter would have

been mightily impressed with the quality and efficiency

he had witnessed in the controlled Falcon environment.

Returning to Dublin he had to wait for the lamp-

lighting concession in a Bill at Whitehall on 22 October

1697. In order to provide the lighting system, Heming

needed to engage a glassmaker to make the

components. Glass had been made in Dublin since

about 1675, so he may have had a prior arrangement

with the former glasshouse before fleeing in 1688. With
only tourist’s knowledge of Continental glassmaking,
the returning Roche might have appreciated the

advantages of co-operating with Heming, whose
intention was to light the whole city of Dublin.

Whatever transpired, Roche was twice frustrated by
tragic failure.

Reports of the majestic Falcon cone passed along the

traditional glassy grapevine within a very short time

and ambitious young men pestered gaffer fathers for
the glassmaking totem of a new age. A small delegation

of Exeter businessmen, aspiring glassmakers, set out in
1691 to visit ‘Bristol and Stourbridge in the Cty of
Worcester or other said places to informe himself in the

art of building a glasshouse and makeing Glasse bottles’
and to ‘capture’ workmen. Unburdened by heavy

import duties, Portuguese wine was shipped in barrels
to the port of Topsham, where wine merchants did, and

bottlemakers could make fortunes in the local currency

of Portuguese gold. They captured workmen who made
bottles, and they too built a new-style glasshouse that

soon fell amongst much recrimination. Included in
John Houghton’s list of 1696, the rebuilt cone operated

for some years before the first brick was laid at Dublin.

Throughout their history cones were frighteningly

unstable. In 1700, ‘a new Glasshouse that cost near

£2000 and was never used fell down on Saturday last of

itself.”‘ A graphic account of the fall of an old cone

glasshouse in ‘dilapidated condition’ at Portwall Lane,
Bristol, around 1820, was recounted by its owner,

Anthony Amatt, who, sensing its imminent failure,
casually removed himself and the workmen in good
time to observe ‘a sort of shivering of the upper part’

before it collapsed inwards.” Dating from the time of

the visit of the Exeter businessmen, it was originally

occupied by a member of the ancient glassmaking

family of Perrott.”

During the summer of 1814, a qualified Swiss

architect called Escher toured industrial areas of

Britain, where he observed and referred to cone

glassworks and some pottery structures as pyramids. He
thought the group at Sunderland gave the landscape a

`sort of Egyptian appearance’, and at the Dumbarton

Crown glasshouse observed that ‘the furnace lay under

a very large pyramid which was designed to catch

smoke.” Belief that the tall cone was meant merely to
draw off smoke contributed to earlier failures by French

glassmakers.”

For a century after the `Kip’ depiction, the haughty

and superior Falcon puffed away with the occasional
distant pictorial glimpse. When the sixteen year old

Henry Barker seated himself on the roof of the Albion
Mills in November 1790 to begin preliminary drawings
for the Panorama of London 1792/3, he saw the Falcon

cone very close and very large. It was not allowed to

spoil the composition, was hacked down with pencil

and disguised with the similarly abused Gravel Lane

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THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

glasshouse. They, and the Albion roof-top, were

probably used as as sort of ‘Faux Terrain’ on the

viewing platform at the giant panorama rotunda in
Leicester Square,” where viewers were given a paper

Key, showing No 8 to be ‘The Glasshouses’. The
`Rhinebeck’ Panorama of 1810 shows a smoking round

glasshouse that seems located in the Gravel Lane

glasshouse area. The old Upper Ground area cone was

probably gone by that date and the cone merely

depicted through nostalgia. Another phantom Falcon
cone is seen in Robert Havell junior’s 1836

Aeronautical View of London, when it had finally given

up smoking. That rotund, middle-aged depiction had

been repeatedly copied since the 1750 South West

Prospect of London engraving by T Bowles (fig 12),

which looked down from a great and unlikely height
towards the base of the cone.

Demolition of the old cone attracted no recorded

attention amidst the increasing industrialisation of the

area, and no precise date is known for its demise. Too

proud and sturdy to fall in the Great Tempest of 26
November 1703, when more than 800 properties were

laid to ruins in London alone, including most of Wren’s

church spires and the total loss of the Eddystone

Lighthouse. Too strong when William, the last of the

Falcon Jacksons, then also dabbling in pottery at

Lambeth, smugly reported to the Royal Society the fall

of a Pot-house belonging to a Gravel Lane neighbour in
the Earthquake of 8 March 1749/50.” It must have been

pulled down brick by brick. A map of 1821 locates
‘Harrison’s Bottle Wharf on the general site,
demonstrating that ancillary buildings continued in

their former use for many years. The cone foundations
are now appropriately entombed beneath the high
technology Lloyd’s computer centre. Even as the

historical glasshouse was reduced to dust, its relevance

and general utility remained the anonymous model for
glasshouses built well into the 19th century.

Figure 13.

Henry Bell’s `Grounciplat of King’s

Lyn’, 1680

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THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 14.

Rastrick’s Ichnographia of King’s Lynn, 1725

NOTES

1.
IGI, Shropshire, at St Leonard’s Bridgnorth. 16

May 1659, of Edward/Elizabeth Jackson.

2.
Will. PRO/PROB 11/508/119. 1709.

3.
W H Bowles,
History of the Vauxhall and Ratcliffe

Glass Houses
(1926), p 12.

4.
Unidentified newspaper cutting dated December

1684, regarding a lost dog of ‘Mr James Edwards,
Master of the New Cockpit near the Falcon on the

Bankside in Southwark.’ City of Westminster,

Victoria Reference Library, Special Collection of
London Inn references: ‘Falcon Inn’.
5.

`To be sold all sorts of the best and finest

Drinking-Glasses, and curious Glasses for
Ornament, and likewise all sorts of Glass Bottles,

by Francis Jackson, and John Straw, Glassmakers,
at their Glass-Houses near the Faulkon in

Southwark, and at Lynn in Norfolk.’,
London

Gazette,
27 February 1693.

6.
Survey of London, Bankside,
VoI xxii (London,

1950), plate 65.

7.
London fogs were known in the time of John

Evelyn, who in 1661 published his
Funnfugium, or

the Inconvenience of the Air and Smoke of London

dissipated; together with some Remedies….

8.
Survey of London, Bankside,
Vol xxii (London,

1950), p 47.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

9.
Bishop of Winchester. Indenture, 25 August 1688

(155122 19/20).

10.
Bishop of Winchester. Indenture, 27 February

1699 (155124 16/20).

11.
Eleanor S Godfrey,

The Development of English

Glassmaking,
1560-1640 (1975), pp 154-156.

12.
Newcomen Society Transactions,
Vol XIV, p 67;

Rhys Jenkins, ‘The Reverberatory Furnace with

Coal Fuel, 1612-1712’ (1934).

13.
PRO, Chancery Proceedings, Hutchinson v

Wyndus, 1684. Also ‘The Case of Edmund
Fleming Who First set up the New Lights in the

City of London’ (1689), Brit Mus 796 h 21/6.

14.
Calendar of State Papers Domestic,

13 December

1692.

15.
Ibid,

7 November 1691 and 27 September 1697.

16.
‘On Thursday a fire broke out in Mr John

Williams Glasshouse in The Close, Newcastle,
occasioned by the foulness of the chimney, which

taking fire, some of the sparks got in between the
Pantiles and kindled the ceiling’,
Newcastle

Journal,
13 December 1764.

17.
R Holinshed,

The Chronicles of England
(London,

1807) iv, p 329.

18.
By kind permission of Dr D C Watts.

19.
Hand in Hand policy, Nos 29650-29657, 19

August 1715. Guildhall Library Ms 8674/14.

20.
F H Garner,
Trans English Ceramic Circle,

I, Part 5

(1935) p 35.

21.
Accounts, December 1706 and Midsummer 1710,

Wren Society,
Vol XV, pp 146 & 192.

22.
Wren Society, V ols
XIV and XV.

23.
First known introduction of ‘A cone above the

inner dome; this idea is the essence of Wren’s final

solution’: Kerry Downes, Sir Christopher Wren:
The Design of St Paul’s Cathedral (1988), p 109.
`Wren left the form of the dome in abeyance until

about 1697, when the choir was completed and
opened, and financial as much as structural

support was a matter for concern. There are no
dome studies for which a date can be established in

the quarter
–
century

to 1700′,
ibid,
p 108.

24.
‘A Belfast Newsletter of August 19, 1785, reported

a new glass-house, 120 feet high, “being the largest

in Britain or Ireland”. In 1823 one was to let in
Belfast, the cone of which was 150 feet high’, D R

Guttery,
From Broad-Glass to Cut Crystal
(1956), p

38, note 3.

25.
Information: Stuart and Sons Ltd, Redhouse

Glassworks, Wordsley, Stourbridge, West

Midlands.

26.
Deed dated 2 April 1695, Norfolk Record Office,

LL/C11/6.

27.
E M James, ‘King’s Lynn and the Glass-making

Industry’,
Norfolk Museums Service Information

Sheet (1979).

28.
W A Thorpe,

English Glass
(1935) p 162.

29.
Wren Society, Vol XIV, p 80.

30.
See Chapter II of M S Dudley Westropp,
Irish

Glass (1920).

31.
D R Guttery,

From Broad-Glass to Cut Crystal

(1956), p 38.

32.
W J Pountney,
Old Bristol Potteries (1972),
p.257.

In 1798 Anthony Amatt, a potter turned stocking
manufacturer, had bought the remainder of the

lease of the crown glass and flint glass manufactory

situate at the corner of Thomas Street and Portwall
Lane. The sale was brought about by the

bankruptcy of a former partner of the lessees,

William Stephens, glass manufacturer: see
ibid,
p

253.

33.
Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire

Archaeological Society,
No 47 (1925), p 229.

34.
Escher’s ‘Letters from England’. Librarian of the

Eisenbibliothek at Schaffhausen.

35.
Godfrey,
op cit,

p 155, note 1.

36.
London from the Roof of the Albion Mills. A

facsimile of Robert and Henry Aston Barker’s

Panorama of 1792-3.
Guildhall Library Publication

(1988), notes 8 and 18.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

37. ‘Communicated by Mr Wm Jackson, Potter, to C
Mortimore, MD, Secr RS’,
Philosophical

Transactions,
Vol XLVI, 497 (1750) p 700.
Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to the following for their help in

obtaining permission to reproduce certain illustra-

tions: the staff of Westminster City Archives; Mr

Martin Stancliffe, Surveyor to the Fabric of St Paul’s
Cathedral; Ms Ros Palmer, Curator of King’s Lynn

Museums; the Secretary of Goodwood House; Mrs

Mary Boydell and Mr Barra Boydell of the Glass
Society of Ireland; Ms Lynne MacNab of the Guildhall
Library. I am also grateful to Mr Robert Crayford, FSA,

Architectural Archivist of St Paul’s Cathedral, for
much kind help while researching this article.

Certain illustrations appear by courtesy of the follow-

ing: fig. 2, City of Westminster Archives: fig. 3, Dr D C
Watts: fig. 6, The Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s: figs.
7-9, 13-14, King’s Lynn Museums, Norfolk Museums

Service; fig. 10, Goodwood House; fig. 11, Mr Barra
Boydell; fig. 12, Guildhall Library, Corporation of

London.

TILE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Hugh Tait, FSA

FELIX SLADE (1790-1868)

A paper originally read to the Circle on

V
I

18 November 1993

PART I

A collector in uncharted waters

Felix Slade’s pre-eminent position as the first great

connoisseur and collector of glass is matched only by

his enlightened role as the first great ‘educator’ in the
history of glass — from its early manifestations in the

Middle East thousands of years ago to its sophisticated
brilliance at the 1862 and 1867 International

Exhibitions in London and Paris respectively.’

In both areas, his approach was global. As a fastidious

collector, he unexpectedly had the perspicacity to value
the fruits of archaeological excavations, even the more

fragmentary. As a lone ‘educator’ in this field, he had

the vision to create two indispensable tools: firstly, a

wide-ranging, if not comprehensive, collection of well-
chosen specimens, many documented and some signed

or dated; and secondly, a scholarly
Catalogue
of his

collection with a wealth of illustrations (Colour plate 1)

and, at the beginning, a lucid
resume
of the historical

and technical background. On his death in 1868, he

gave these two working tools to the British public; he
not only ensured that the
Catalogue
would be printed

exactly as he had planned it, but he bequeathed his

collection (of more than a thousand items) to the
British Museum so that it would remain available for

the benefit of the public in perpetuity.
Given the scale and the quality of Felix Slade’s

achievements in both these respects, it came as a shock

to discover that this ‘Colossus’ in glass studies had not
been the subject of any scholarly paper, either in

Europe or America, until my lecture in 1992.
1
Even in

1991 lack of space had prevented me from contributing

more than the briefest assessment of Slade’s significance

when preparing the ‘Introduction’ to the British

Museum’s new book on glass, although many of his

finest acquisitions were to be reproduced in colour
throughout the book.’ Since 1938, awareness of Slade’s

towering stature as the pioneer collector and historian
of glass has not been helped by the dispersal of his great

collection; it is now scattered between six of the

Antiquities Departments.’ Sadly, no-one today has ever
seen the Slade Collection brought together — not even
temporarily for a special exhibition in his memory –

and yet its breadth and excellence could not fail to

astound all but the most blinkered of glass specialists

(fig. 1). So now, the printed
Catalogue
provides the only

way of gaining an understanding — albeit an inadequate

one — of Felix Slade’s achievement and of the degree of
his generosity in bequeathing it to posterity. At the

same time, copies of the
Catalogue
are becoming even

more scarce; it is particularly difficult for those abroad

and so this great early reference work is far less well-

known than it deserves to be. Without a copy to hand, it

is impossible to appreciate how great had been the

advance in knowledge about the history of glassmaking
during the lifetime of Felix Slade and, by encapsulating

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

Figure 1.

Photograph showing part of the British

Museum’s display of the Slade Collection of Glass,

soon after it had been bequeathed
in

1868 by Felix

Slade Esq, FSA.
(British Museum)

these developments in the text, how big an impact his
Catalogue
had internationally in the last quarter of the

nineteenth century — even providing the inspiration for

a new wave of pastiches and forgeries.

Some confusion about the date of the publication of

Slade’s
Catalogue
exists and needs to be clarified,

especially as the present widely-held misconceptions

are detrimental to Slade’s reputation. In this century,
the customary practice among authors and publishers

has been to refer to Slade’s
Catalogue

as having been

published in London in 1871 — whereas it was first

published in 1869. The reason for the confusion is that

the
de luxe
version (large 4to) with colour plates did not

appear until that later date (1871) but all the text (apart
from two sets of additions’) with all the black and white

illustrations (including the many line-drawings of the

different patterns of Venetian
filigrana)
had already

been published in 1869, just one year after Felix Slade’s

death. Consequently, there can be no doubt that the
Catalogue
had, indeed, been completed within Slade’s

own lifetime and that it represents his anonymous
magnum opus.

Felix Slade died on 29 March 1868. His Will was

made on 25 March and to it he added several codicils,
all of which bear that same date. Under the very precise

wording of the relevant codicil, he gave to the British

Museum all the items of glass listed in the
Catalogue
of

his collection then in the course of being printed,

together with any further specimens acquired since his

Catalogue
had been finished. Furthermore, he left

money so that the publication of the
Catalogue

should

go ahead under the editorship of his friend and
executor, Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, Keeper of
Mediaeval and Later Antiquities (as it is now called) at
the British Museum. As a result, the
Slade Collection

Catalogue
(ed A W Franks) was published in London,

1869 — and this is precisely how it is correctly recorded

in the
Dictionary of National Biography,
(Vol LII, 1897,

pp 362-3).

Both the 1869 and 1871 editions of the
Catalogue

were privately printed and, for whatever reason, the
title-page was rather misleading; it reads:
Notes on the

History of Glassmaking by Alexander Nesbitt,
FSA [in

bold large lettering; then, in small letters and in less
prominent fashion, it continues:-]
prepared as an

introduction to the Catalogue of the Collection of Glass of
various periods formed by the late Felix Slade, FSA and

bequeathed by him to the British Museum.
As a result, it

is not uncommon to find this
Catalogue

listed (in the

Bibliographies so often provided in recent glass

literature) under ‘Nesbitt, A’. Although his authorship

of the preliminary dissertation (pp i -1) is irrefutably
established, Nesbitt had no part in the
Catalogue
proper

(pp 1-160), as, indeed, Felix Slade makes abundantly
clear in his signed
Preface,

where he additionally states

that the
Catalogue

was in the first instance drawn up

for me by Mr W Chaffers; it has since been much added

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

to, and indeed nearly rewritten, by Mr W A Nicholls.’
Later in the
Preface,
Slade acknowledges his debt to

`another friend, Mr A W Franks, for much information

as well as for having revised a considerable portion of

the text’, while at the same time Felix Slade seems to
accept full responsibility for the
Catalogue,

which he

describes as ‘the result of my efforts to illustrate this

elegant branch of art…and it will be for them [the
readers] to determine how far I have succeeded in the

object which I had in view’. Therefore, it is both clear
that, on the one hand Alexander Nesbitt was definitely

not the author of the
Catalogue

and that, on the other

hand, the ambiguity created by Felix Slade’s excessive

modesty should no longer stand in the way of proper
recognition.

Much of the problem stems from one of the most

influential glass historians, Robert Schmidt of Berlin,

who in 1912 published an authoritative work,
Das Glas

(2nd edition, 1922); in both editions, he listed

Alexander Nesbitt as the author of
‘The Catalogue of the

Collection of Glass formed by Felix Slade,
(London,

1871)’. Inevitably, this form was widely copied and,

indeed, perpetuated to this day. Is it too late to change?

The late Donald Harden favoured a simple reference
under the surname ‘Slade; most recently, in 1987 he

omitted all reference to Alexander Nesbitt.’ If this form

were to be adopted in future, Harden’s reference should
be amended to include the 1869 publication date; the

book would then be listed under ‘Slade 1869 and 1871’,
followed by the title:
Catalogue of the Collection of Glass

formed by Felix Slade Esq, FSA
(ed A W Franks, London,

1869 and 1871).

There is much to commend this solution, not least

that it would ‘give credit where credit is due.’ When

Felix Slade was born in Lambeth in 1790, just as the

shock-waves from the French Revolution were being

felt in London, there was very little written on the

subject of glass-making and no public or private
collection that attempted to illustrate it. Felix Slade was
to grow up, study law and reach the age of twenty-five

before Napoleon’s final defeat brought peace back to
Europe. Slade’s first visit to Italy took place in 1817;

fifty years later, when the fame of his wide-ranging
collection of glass led to requests for loans to

exhibitions, his greatest concern was for the safety of his
`fragile Venetian beauties’. In 1817, when Slade was

starting, he would have found in the British Museum,

for example, no ancient Egyptian glass — the first

acquisition was in 1834 — and no books in any language

to read on the historical aspects of glassmaking

throughout the world. The available literature dealt

mostly with glass from a technical point of view: in
English, for example, from Christopher Merret’s 1662

translation of Antonio Neri,
L’Arte Vetraria
(Florence,

1612) to the contribution written for the 3rd edition of
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1797). Similarly, the

French works, such as Haudicquer de Blancourt’s
De

l’Art de la Verrerie
(1697), the superbly illustrated

contribution to the great
Encyclopedic
of Diderot and

D’Alembert (1772) and C Loysel’s
Essai sur la Verrerie

(1800), were not concerned with the historical

perspective. In Italy, apart from the early works

published in the 16th and early 17th centuries, there

was a dearth of information — a situation that changed

only slowly after Dominique Bussolin published
Les

CeTebres Verreries de Venise et de Murano in
1847, with

its four small pages of historical introduction.

Consequently, Felix Slade’s endeavours might have

been less spectacularly rewarded if he had not enjoyed

the friendship of Franks and, consequently, access to

the expertise of Franks’ colleagues, both in England and

abroad. Franks himself was, most happily, not only

deeply involved in the study of enamels both in

antiquity and in post-Roman times but also in the other
manifestations of glass — hence his important seminal
publication,
Vitreous Art,

which appeared in 1857 in

connection with the famous Manchester Art Treasures
Exhibition.’ This penetrating study of enamelling is

preceded by a masterly sketch of the history of glass-
making (pp 1-11, col pls 1-5, figs. 1-2), much of which

was ‘borrowed’ (to use Alexander Nesbitt’s own word)
for Nesbitt’s preliminary dissertation at the beginning

of the
Catalogue of the Slade Collection
of Glass
(1869

and 1871).

Felix Slade was a Londoner — and he fitted in

smoothly with the unostentatious, but intellectually
gifted, circles centred on the Inns of Court and on

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 2.

Portrait of Felix Slade; chalks and water-colours; signed: Margaret Carpenter, 1851.

Presented in 1874 by her son, William, to the Department of Prints and Drawings.

(British Museum)

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 3.

Drawing of a young man, incorrectly

described as ‘Felix Slade’ when published in April
1991. The drawing was acquired in 1962 (Reg No

1962, 12-8, 6) as a portrait of the youthful W H

Carpenter.
(British Museum)

Bloomsbury, especially University College and the

British Museum. Indeed, the only known portrait of

Slade, reliably signed and dated, is a very personal and
intimate study, done by Mrs Margaret Sarah

Carpenter,’ the wife of his close friend, William
Hookham Carpenter (1792-1866), who from 1845 to

his death in 1866 was Keeper of Prints and Drawings at

the British Museum (fig. 2). Before she married in 1817
at the age of twenty-four, Margaret (née Geddes) had

already an established reputation for her portraits and

she went on to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy
between 1818-1866; on the death of her husband,

Queen Victoria granted her a pension of £100 per

annum. Her portrait of Felix Slade is signed: ‘Margaret

Carpenter, 1851′; it displays a subtle use of chalks and

water-colours on a drab-coloured paper (14.5in x
10.5in) and, interestingly, her son, William, presented it
to the British Museum in 1874, two years after

Margaret’s death — suggesting, perhaps, that it had
never left the Carpenter family. William, himself a

talented artist and etcher, would have known Slade well

and must have judged this work to be a worthy
representation of his mother’s skill as a portraitist.

Certainly, it provides conclusive evidence that the

identification of the unsigned, undated and uninscribed

drawing, illustrated (fig. 3) in April 1991 by Martin

Postlem as a portrait of
Felix Slade in 1851,
is wholly

inaccurate; this drawing is of a young man and indeed,

was purchased by the Department of Prints and
Drawings in 1962 from Mr G Norman in the belief that

it depicts the youthful William Hookham Carpenter at
his desk. It may do so; however, it neither seems to
exhibit the qualities that characterise Margaret

Carpenter’s work nor does the actual likeness seem

convincing when compared with William’s fine etching

of his father, which is signed and dated 1847 (fig. 4).

Slade and Carpenter shared a common interest in art,

especially in prints; they were almost exact

contemporaries, the latter having been born in London

(Bruton Street) in 1792. His father’s business premises

were in nearby Old Bond Street where he had been a
bookseller and publisher of note. Felix Slade chose to

live quietly in Lambeth at his father’s house in Walcot
Place (now part of the Kennington Road), having

followed in his father’s footsteps and become Proctor in

Doctors’ Commons, a lucrative office that was later
abolished. His father, Robert, owned land in and

around Lambeth and Robert’s wife, Eliza, was heiress to

the Foxcroft estate in Yorkshire, her father being
Edward Foxcroft of Halsteads in Thornton-in-

Lonsdale. Perhaps this Yorkshire lineage is responsible

for Felix Slade’s reputation in later years for being an

impressively tall figure with a ruddy complexion;

certainly Margaret Carpenter’s portrait in 1851 conveys

that impression, with its emphasis on his commanding,

if somewhat balding, head and the hint of geniality
around the eyes and mouth.

His father was Deputy-Lieutenant for the County of

Surrey when he died in 1835 but the forty-five year old
Felix Slade was happy to remain at Walcot Place, filling

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL 8

Figure 4.

Slade’s friend, William Hookham

Carpenter (1792-1866); etching by his son, William

Carpenter, dated 1847.

(British Museum)

the house with a highly impressive collection of books,

manuscripts and prints (both engravings and etchings).

Many of these, together with remarkable examples of

rare medals and coins, were to be bequeathed to the

British Museum in 1868. They are highly esteemed to

this day; in the field of engravings, Slade’s prints are
now valued not so much for their rarity as for their

superlative quality. One amusing record, however, is a
letter of 1821 from Sir Walter Scott, addressed to Felix

Slade’s mother, in which he denies authorship of the

Waverley Novels — a pretence that he finally abandoned
in 1827. Another exception that helps to fill in the

shadowy background surrounding Felix Slade, the great

connoisseur, is a white-metal medal struck to

commemorate the building and opening of London
Bridge on 1 August 1831. Slade was no doubt present as

King William IV and Queen Adelaide performed the

official ceremonies that were the climax of a very grand
and colourful spectacle, and thereafter he would — as a

resident of that rapidly developing area south of the

Thames — have become very familiar with John

Rennie’s new bridge, with its five stone arches, and

might not have welcomed its sale and relocation at Lake

Havasu City, Arizona, in the early 1970s.

When Felix’s elder brother, William, died in 1858,

there were no other male heirs and so Felix Slade

inherited the entirety of both his father’s fortune and

his mother’s estates. He was then sixty-eight and clearly

had no wish to move away from his family home in

Walcot Place, even though it was probably becoming

too small for his collections. He continued to welcome

interested visitors, for he had acquired the reputation of

delighting in discussing his treasures with friends and

acquaintances as he showed them around the house.

At this time, Slade was clearly concerned to make

plans for the future. He had evidently become

convinced that Art education was of great beneficial

value to society — both by acquiring a knowledge and

understanding
of the

Fine Arts of the past and by

learning in a practical and critical school of
contemporary art. On 16 February 1857, in a letter to
Dr Philip Bliss, Keeper of Archives at Oxford

University, he had already written on the subject of the
Government’s failure to promote education in the Arts

despite the benefits to society of such a liberal policy:

`Is it not extraordinary that the great advantages

of Art education being admitted, there is such
difficulty in obtaining the means from

Government? Why what addition would all the
claims of Art in the most extended sense make to
the enormous amount of our expenditure, so

much of it too carelessly spent? And what

mistakes are made, when a grant is squeezed for

them.’

These views, increasingly strongly held by Slade, led

him to use his new wealth (under a fourth codicil of his

will) to found ‘three or more Professorships for
promoting the study of the Fine Arts, to be termed the

Slade Professorships of the Fine Arts’, one each at the

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and one or
more at the University of London. He left £45,000 for

this purpose and directed that out of the same sum a

trust should be set up within two years of his decease, to

endow at University College, London, six scholarships

in the Fine Arts, to be called
‘The Slade Exhibitions’,

each of £50 per annum, for students under nineteen

years of age.

In May 1868, less than two months after Felix Slade’s

death, University College set up a seven-man

committee to work with Slade’s executors and trustees,

especially as no-one had made any provision for
funding the building costs of a new School. While these

difficulties were being slowly resolved, the election of

Ruskin to the Slade Professorship at Oxford went
ahead, and a histrionic inaugural lecture was duly
delivered on 8 February 1870, but as it attracted such a

large audience, it first had to adjourn from the
Museum’s lecture hall to the Sheldonian Theatre.

The election in 1869 of the forty-nine year old

architect, Matthew Digby Wyatt, to the Slade

Professorship at Cambridge was a happy choice, for he

had known Felix Slade and shared his views. Convinced

that it would be in accord with the spirit of the
Founder, he opened his lectures not only to all

members of the University but also ‘to any ladies or

gentlemen of the town or neighbourhood who may
honour me with their attendance.’

In London, at University College, progress was slower

because it was decided that a whole new Faculty of Fine

Arts, with its own instructors and classes, should also be
created. By the Spring of 1870 a compromise had been

agreed and building work on the new Slade School of
Fine Art was able to begin shortly afterwards. At the

opening of ‘The Slade’ on 2 October 1871, the first

Slade Professor, Sir Edward Poynter, gave his inaugural

lecture, dismissing the education offered by the
Government Schools at South Kensington as relating

merely to ‘ornamental manufacture’ — not to high art,

as was to be the aim of The Slade. Poynter was perhaps

less controversial — and more in line with the Founder’s

sentiments — when he went on to proclaim that there
was ‘no influence in the world so ennobling as that of

the Fine Arts.’

All three Slade Professorships, together with the

School, continue to flourish to this day, but probably
few of the many enthusiastic audiences attending those
three Universities have connected the name of Slade

with the creator of the first great collection that

seriously attempted to trace the history of glass

throughout the world, from its early beginnings in the

Middle East. That Felix Slade saw it as a teaching

collection — not a frozen monument to his memory — is

underlined by his bequest of a further £3,000 with

instructions to his executors to buy further additions to
his glass collection. Between January 1869-May 1873,

more than seven hundred glass items (including more

than one hundred ancient beads) were bought and

these additions are always officially described as

`Presented by the executors of the late Felix Slade Esq,
FSA’. It was both a measure of the trust that Slade had

in the judgment of Franks that he set up this purchase-

fund for glass in this way, and a measure of his own
modesty that he recognised the need for the collection

to be further enriched to keep pace with the growth of

knowledge.

PART II

Felix Slade, Anglo-Dutch glasses and

David Wolff

As a pioneer collector, Felix Slade knew the risks of

fishing in uncharted waters but as an Englishman, he

seems to have been surprised — and disappointed — by
the insuperable problems of achieving a fair and

balanced representation of English glass. Whereas

Nesbitt stressed at the beginning of his contribution to

the
Catalogue

(p ii) that ‘no pains have been spared to

make it [the Collection] as complete and as historically

instructive as possible’, Slade himself admitted that in

the uncharted waters of English glass he had been

defeated.

In the
Catalogue,
for example, Slade had to

acknowledge that little seemed to be known about the

history of glassmaking in England and so, because of

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 5.

The ‘Wizen’ covered goblet; English

lead glass, circa 1690; wheel-engraved decoration

commemorating the launch of the ‘Velzen’, a Dutch
East Indianian, was executed by Jacob Sang at
Amsterdam in 1757. Ht 49.5 cm. Presented by the

executors of the late Felix Slade Esq, FSA, in 1869.
(British Museum)

`the dearth of specimens of unquestionable English

origin’, only ten examples were being listed under the

heading of
English Glass;

however, the reader is warned

that the nationality of most of them ‘is very doubtful’ (p

159). Slade was right to be so cautious and time has

vindicated his view. He was, it seems, not alone in

feeling a sense of frustration in this area, for when

another pioneer collection of glass — that formed by

Lady Mary Bagot — was auctioned at Christie’s on 14-15

May 1840, an English glass beaker with a Beilby
enamelled coat-of-arms fetched no more than one

guinea, whereas two Venetian glasses made £19.15s and
10 guineas respectively.” This nervous uncertainty

about English glass was to remain among collectors
until Albert Hartshorne in 1897 provided the first

serious reference work on English glass.” Uniquely, the

Slade Bequest of 1868 and the activities of the executors

in the short period from 1869-73 illuminate in a vivid

way the prevailing lack of national awareness of its own
history in the field of glassmaking.

The most dramatic example can be found among the

very first purchases made immediately after Felix
Slade’s death and presented by the executors to the

Museum in January 1869. Undoubtedly one of the most
spectacular of English colourless lead-glass goblets ever

to have been found, the famous
‘Velzen’
goblet and

cover of about 1690 (fig. 5) is in perfect condition and
now does much to redress the paucity of English glass in

the Bequest itself, but at the time its ‘Englishness’ was
not recognised.” It is decorated with cnipt diamond

waies’ on the cover and the lower part of the bowl,

whilst the elaborate openwork stem in the Venetian
manner is gracefully echoed in the corresponding

openwork finial on the cover. Furthermore, this glass
must have reached Holland in the first half of the

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 6.

Goblet enclosing trapped air in both

knop and stem, typical of English manufacture; the

bowl stippled by Frans Greenwood, of Rotterdam;

c 1740-50. Ht 24.1 cm.
(Slade Bequest, 1868, British Museum)

eighteenth century because the wheel-engraved

decoration on the bowl was added in Amsterdam some

sixty or more years after the glass had been made. The

signature, engraved in diamond-point on the base,
Figure 7.

Wine-glass with an opaque-twist stem,

typical of English manufacture circa 1760-1770.

Ht 16.8 cm.

(Slade Bequest, 1868, British Museum)

reads:
‘Jacob Sang. Fec: Amsterdam 1757′.
He and his

brother, Simon Jacob, first advertised in the
Amsterdainsche Courant
in 1753 and it is therefore

conjectured that they may recently have arrived from

Germany, where other members of the Sang family

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

were glass engravers in Weimar and Brunswick. For the
Dutch, Jacob Sang’s work set a new and high standard

and he soon attracted commissions from the wealthy, as

in the case of this covered goblet; the wheel-engraved

inscription in Dutch on one side of the bowl begins:
`On the occasion of the hundredth ship, named the
Velzen,
built by Master Willem Theunisz. Blok, in the

service of the Honourable East India Company,

launched at the yard on 30 June, 1757…’. Not only had
Blok (born 1684) become the chief shipwright to the

Dutch East India Company but the
Velzen,

named after

a village near Amsterdam, was to make several voyages

to the Far East before leaving the Texel for the last time

in 1771. Such a splendidly documented work would

have delighted Felix Slade, especially as he was not

aware that English glasses were in demand in Holland

throughout the 18th century and that the term

`Engelsche pocaal’
can be found in several contemporary

Dutch documents relating to some of the best Dutch

glass engravers. Indeed, in 1868-9 when the executors

of Felix Slade acquired and presented the
‘Wizen’

covered goblet, nothing in the records indicates that

anyone recognised the glass as being of English
manufacture or that it pre-dated the Jacob Sang wheel-

engraved decoration by more than half a century. This

realisation was to come much later.

Similarly, Felix Slade was to remain unaware that he

had unwittingly acquired three 18th century English

glasses when purchasing, with impressive

connoisseurship, representative specimens of Dutch

stipple-engraved decoration on glass. The earliest of the
three is a tall, beautifully clear lead-glass goblet

enclosing tears of trapped air in knop and stem; the

bowl has a bacchic scene brilliantly executed in

diamond-point stippling and signed by Frans

Greenwood (1680-1763).” He was a gifted amateur
decorator of glasses and since 1726, had worked as a
civil servant in Dordrecht. Although of English descent,
his birthplace was Rotterdam, and his poems, like the

one on the bowl of this glass goblet, are in Dutch and

were published in Holland during his lifetime.

Regarded as one of Greenwood’s masterpieces of

stipple-engraving, this large glass probably dates from
the decade 1740-1750 (fig. 6).
Figure 8.

Detail of the bowl of the English wine-

glass (fig. 7) showing the very subtle stipple engraving
added in Holland and attributed to ‘the best period’

of David Wolf’s oeuvre, circa 1765.

(Slade Bequest, 1868, British Museum)

The second of Slade’s three English glasses with

Dutch decoration is a wineglass, with a funnel-shaped

bowl and an opaque twist in the stem” — a type often
dated
`circa
1760-1770′ (fig. 7). Indeed, stems of this

kind — comprising a pair of spiral threads encircling a

`gauze’ or cable of fine opaque-white threads — were

developed in England, along with countless variations,

during the third quarter of the 18th century. The bowl,

however, is very delicately decorated with the most
subtle form of Dutch stippling (fig. 8). It is necessary to

hold the glass up to the light and, by turning it slowly
round, the elusive scene of a boy and girl playfully
releasing the bird from its cage can be seen beneath a

broad ribbon bearing the words ‘AUREA LIBERTAS’.
Interestingly, the
Slade Catalogue
entry recorded the

mid-19th century view that the scene ‘was produced by

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 9.

The ‘Justice’ glass stippled by David

Wolff in The Hague in Jan-Feb 1775, for the ‘Weekly

Society of the Sheriff Aldermen and Town Clerk of
Leyden.’ Ht 20.4 cm.

(Stedelijk Museum, De Lakenhal’, Leyden)
means of fluoric acid, like an etching, by covering the

surface with wax, and then, after outlining and stippling
the subject through it with a steel point, by pouring the

acid over…’. The stippled scene on this glass is not

signed but can be attributed to David Wolff (1732-98).
Controversially, Wolff s early
oeuvre
has recently been

re-attributed, on purely subjective stylistic grounds, to

two undocumented and unnamed engravers who, (for

the sake of convenience ) have been called
‘Alius’
(the

Other) and
‘Contemporaneus’,

but illogically no

attempt has been made to publish an assessment of

Wolffs
oeuvre

in the period 1752
–

1775, when he was

aged 20-43.’
6

Born in ‘s Hertogenbosch, David Wolff is thought to

have spent most of his life in The Hague. His father,

Andries Wolff, was a Swiss who married Alida van Dijk,

but little is known about the family or how the eldest
son, David, rose to become a renowned and prolific
glass-engraver. When he was thirty, he married Gerritje
de Reede of The Hague on 31 October 1762; she died in

1779. Unfortunately, the earliest documented specimen

of his work — the famous ‘Justice’ glass in
`De Lakenhal’

at Leyden (fig. 9) — was delivered as late as March 1775,
when he was already forty-three years old and a well-
established figure in The Netherlands. Before my

publication of the ‘Justice’ glass in 1968,
17
it had

unfortunately been mistaken by Dr van Gelder for the

glass ‘delivered by
J
Gersom in 1773
78
but the list of

expenses addressed to Mr A C de Malnoe, the Town

Clerk, dated 2 March 1775 (preserved in the Leyden

archives) proves otherwise. It is here translated but the

original Dutch, as transcribed and published in 1968, is

again provided:”

Expenses of the new goblet

Amount for the drawing

A little box for the goblet
For
the
goblet in transit

2
— 6 —

Transport of the stippled goblet

To Delfos
10
—10 — .

To D Wolff
52
— 10 — . .

f
66
—

—

It is interesting to note that the stippling was not

done by David Wolff in Leyden; the glass was

THE GLASS CI RCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 10.

Design for the ‘Justice’ glass of Leyden, executed by the Leyden artist, Abraham Delfos, in 1775.

(Gemeentelijke Archiefdienst, Leyden)

presumably transported to and from his premises in

The Hague — at an additional cost. Indeed, the fourth

expense concerns the transport of the
finished
glass,

which is specifically described at this stage in the

expenses account as
‘de
gepointeerde pocaar;

significantly, the sum involved is appreciably smaller
than the other transit cost, when the glass is not

described as stippled. Indeed, the additional 2 florins
charged would seem to indicate that the undecorated

glass may have travelled a long way to reach The Hague

— perhaps in a consignment from England?

David Wolff was paid five times as much as the

Leyden artist, Abraham Delfos (1731-1820), whose

design for the decoration of this glass is still preserved at

Leyden, signed and dated 1775 (fig. 10). In this case, as
perhaps in many others, David Wolff was not

responsible for the original artistic composition. Like

silversmiths and many other gifted craftsmen of the
18th century, David Wolff was commissioned to copy

the artistic creations of others. Since the Delfos

drawing, executed in Indian ink, is dated 1775, David
Wolff would seem to have completed this commission

within two months (late January/February) and few will
disagree that the many changes introduced by Wolff

have greatly enhanced the artistic content. It is only
rarely that a comparison of this kind can be made but,

in assessing the high calibre of Wolff s work and the

significance of his contribution to the art of stippling on
glass, this evidence is of particular value. Frustratingly,
the ten recorded extant glasses stippled and signed by

David Wolff all have late dates: the earliest bears the

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 11.

Wooden travelling-case designed to

house the book and four glasses of the ‘Weekly Society’

of Leyden, each being fitted snugly into an individual

and lockable compartment. Probably made soon after
1754.

(Stedelijk Museum, ‘De Lakenhal’, Leyden)

date 1784 (when he was already fifty-two years old) and

the latest bears the date 1796 (less than two years before
he died of a pectoral disease —
Borstkwaal ).”

This corpus of ten late works does not, therefore,

provide a sound basis for accurately defining the

stylistic criteria by which the products of Wolffs early
and middle periods can be judged. His health and
probably his eyesight can be assumed to have

deteriorated steeply during the period 1784-1796; for
he was by then in such poverty that his wife had been

buried in 1779
‘Pro Deo’
(i.e. so poor that no burial fees

were charged) and their seven children had been named

in a Record of Orphans’ Court, The Hague, which was

signed by David Wolff on 28 February 1780. He himself
died a pauper on 8 February 1798.
Only ten years after Wolffs death, the Van Buren

Collection was sold on 8-12 November 1808 (see

Appendix B of Wilfred Buckley’s book on Wolff) and in
the Sale
Catalogue
the fourteen glasses in lots 98-111

were not only described as stippled by Wolff but were
also recommended as being ‘of his best period’. None

was stated to be signed. In 1926 Hudig, who had traced

seven of the fourteen, declared four of them to be
executed in the more delicate manner of strong

contrasts and three to be executed in the more even
manner of the signed glasses (1784-96).
21
In his prime,

David Wolffs stippled decoration was so superior that

within ten years of his death, the auctioneer and his

audience could with ease distinguish the products of his
best period; furthermore, it was a distinction worth
making when auctioning the works of David Wolff.

Clearly in 1775 David Wolff’s reputation still

commanded widespread respect and, when the leading

civic officers of the town of Leyden needed a very

special replacement for one of their four engraved
glasses, they turned to David Wolff at The Hague. The
four glasses of the ‘Weekly Society of the Sheriff,

Aldermen and Town Clerk’ of Leyden were kept in a
beautifully designed travelling case (fig. 11) and had a

specific purpose, each being wheel-engraved with an
appropriate device and the toast or legend:

i)
‘Friendship’ — signed ‘J. Sang fc. Amstr. 1754’

ii)
‘The States of Holland and the Burgomaster of

Leiden’ signed ‘J. Sang 1758’

iii)
‘The House of Orange
–
Nassau’, delivered in

March,
1773,
by J. Gersom as a replacement for the

broken original.

iv)
‘Justice’, also a replacement. However, a sketch,

executed in bistre, signed ‘J. Wandelaar f. 1755′

(preserved in the Leyden archives) is the design that

was created for the original glass soon after the
`Weekly Society’ had been formed in 1754 (fig. 12). It

would be interesting to know if Abraham Delfos was
shown it before he started work on his interpretation
of this identical theme — both sketches measure 8 cm

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL S

Figure 12.

Design for the lost ‘Justice’ glass of Leyden, executed by J Wandelaar in 1755 soon after the ‘Weekly

Society’ of Leyden had been founded. (Gemeentelijke Archiefdienst, Leyden)

x 5 cm. More important is the fact that the choice of
Leyden’s leading civic dignitaries fell on David Wolff

when they wanted a worthy replacement, which

would be regularly seen at their civic functions.
Indeed, Wolff’s ‘Justice’ glass is a masterly work of his
maturity and offers the best known evidence of the

quality that had, in earlier days, distinguished his

work and justly brought him widespread renown.

The third glass purchased by Felix Slade for its Dutch

decoration that is most probably of late 18th century
English origin — unrecognised by Felix Slade — is a

stippled portrait wine-glass (fig. 13). Made of a
colourless lead-glass, it has a funnel bowl and faceted

stem that is typical of English glasses made in the period
1780
–
90.
The bowl is stippled by David Wolff and

although it is neither signed nor dated, its more even
manner of stippling is characteristic of his late period

(1784-96). On one side of the bowl (fig. 14), Wolff has

stippled the bust of a middle-aged man wearing a bag-
wig and, on a ribbon, he identifies the sitter with the

words: ‘Mr CORNELIS DE GIJSELAAR
PENSIONARIS TE DORDRECHT’. This gentleman (b

1751 — d 1815) was not elected Pensionary of Dordrecht
until 1779 but as he is known to have married in 1784, it

was suggested by Slade that the glass may have been

stippled on that later occasion. On the opposite side of

the bowl, David Wolff has stippled the well-chosen

motto: `INCLINAT NON COGIT’ beneath a star.

Wolff, who can hardly be accused of flattering the sitter,
has produced a lively portrait-roundel — no doubt

based on an existing miniature
or
a portrait by another

artist.

Figure 14.

Detail of the bowl of the English wine-

glass (fig. 13), showing the more even stippling
attributed to the late period of David Wolff’s oeuvre –

certainly after 1779 when Cornelius van Gijselaar

became Pensionary of Dordrecht and probably as late
as 1784 when the latter was married, and was active-

ly campaigning against the Stadtholder.
(Slade Bequest, 1868, British Museum)

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 13.

Wine-glass with faceted stem, typical of

English manufacture circa 1780-90. Ht 15.7 cm.

(Slade Bequest, 1868, British Museum)

In conclusion, Felix Slade’s acute connoisseurship led

him to acquire high quality specimens — regardless of

the ‘label’. Whatever might be the origin of the glasses

themselves and the correct identity of the decorators,
Slade was secure in the knowledge that he had
discerned pieces of genuine historic interest. His finely

attuned ‘eye’ could be relied upon to recognise the
quality of these glasses, even if the historian of his day

could not enable him to refer to them under the

heading of ‘English Glass’ in his
Catalogue.
Having

tracked them down for his Collection, Felix Slade’s

great contribution was to publish them and then to let

future generations have them constantly available for

study and enjoyment. Today’s continuing debate about
the origin of these glasses” would have been welcomed

by no-one more keenly than by Felix Slade himself.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

NOTES

1.
At the 1862 International Exhibition, Felix Slade

purchased a colourless glass tazza exhibited by J

Mas, one of the founders in 1839 of the glassworks

at Clichy-la-Garenne, near Paris, ‘as one of the best
examples of engraving on glass in the Exhibition,
and this must be the excuse for introducing so
modern a specimen into this catalogue’,
Slade

Catalogue
(London 1869 & 1871), p 137, no 829. It

was first illustrated by Hugh Tait in
Masterpieces of

Glass
(exhibition catalogue, British Museum,

1968), No 250, illus. p 178.

At the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition, just one

year before his death, Felix Slade purchased a small

metal-mounted saucer-shaped dish of a purpurine

glass invented by the Italian chemist, Leopold

Bonafede (1833-78), while working at the Imperial
Glassworks, St Petersburg:
Slade Catalogue

(London, 1871), No 955; for a colour illustration

see J Rudoe,
Decorative Arts 1850-1950: Catalogue

of the British Museum Collection
(London, 1991),

No 266, colour plate III.

2.
Delivered at the International Ceramics Seminar

(held at The Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly) on 14

June 1992. It incorporated much of my research for

the Museum’s small-scale exhibition (without
printed catalogue) held in Spring, 1968, to mark

the centenary of Felix Slade’s death.

3.
Five Thousand Years of Glass,
ed Hugh Tait, (British

Museum Press, 1991: 2nd ed, revised, 1995), p 13;

p15,
30, 34, 38,
45, 49, 66,

69,
82, 86, 105,

110,
111,

119,
168, 172,
175, 176,

186,

190, 197,
200,
201,

206,
207, 208,
209, 210,

213,

214, 216,
222,
223,

224,
225, 226,

227, 229,
236,
237, 238,
239,
240,

242; figs 109, 120, 137, 151, 153, 162, 184.

4.
The British Museum has a number of Antiquities

Departments dealing with material from the

world’s historic cultures and consequently, the
glass bequeathed by Felix Slade in 1868 is now to be
found in the appropriate Department – that is, one

of the following six: (i) Western Asiatic Antiquities,
(ii) Egyptian Antiquities, (iii) Greek and Roman

Antiquities, (iv) Prehistoric and Romano-British

Antiquities, (v) Oriental Antiquities and finally,
(vi) Mediaeval and Later Antiquities.

5.
In the 1869 publication, the
Catalogue
proper (pp

1-160) comprised Nos 1-914; in the 1871
de luxe

edition, there was also an
Addenda

(pp 161-164),

comprising Nos 915-955 (inclusive). These forty
items had clearly been acquired since the

completed MS of the
Catalogue
had been handed

over by Felix Slade to the printers. Indeed, one item
(No 955, see Note 1 above) was bought by Felix

Slade at the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition,
indicating that the
Catalogue
was probably in the

hands of the printers by the middle of 1867.
Secondly, the 1871 edition was provided with an
APPENDIX consisting of various works of art

presented or bequeathed to the Nation by the late

Felix Slade, Esq
(pp 167-183). Apart from four

`Venetian’ glasses (Nos 28-31), three of which he
had presented to the Museum in 1851, all the other

items represent his diverse interests: for example,

archaeological finds (Nos 1-11), mediaeval ivories

and enamel (Nos 12-16), Japanese netsuke (Nos
34-64), manuscripts (Nos 69-82), bookbindings
(Nos 83-105), and the 7,806 Prints and Etchings,

which are briefly summarised under the various

Schools (see also
A Guide to the Slade Collection of

Prints in the British Museum,
London, 1869).

6.
Robert Schmidt,
Das Glas
(Berlin Museum

Handbook, 1912), p 393; (2nd ed revised, 1922), p
409.

7.
D B Harden, et al,
Glass of the Caesars
(exhibition

catalogue, The Corning Museum of Glass, The
British

Museum,

Romisch-Germanisches

Museum, Cologne, 1987) p 300.

8.
A W Franks ‘Vitreous Art’, in J B Waring, A

Handbook to the Museum of Ornamental Art in the

Art Treasures Exhibition
(London, 1857).

Furthermore, the year that Franks graduated at

Cambridge saw the publication of his first book –

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

also devoted to glass and still considered important
— A Book of Ornamental Glazing Quarries
(London/Oxford, 1849). His second book reveals a

further aspect of his specialist knowledge of the

subject:
Examples of Oriental Art in Glass and

Enamels
(London, 1858).

9.
Lawrence Binyon,

Catalogue of Drawings of British

Artists…in the Department ofPrints and Drawings in

the British Museum
(London, 1898), p 197, no 2.

10.
Martin Postle, ‘Samuel Palmer and The Slade’,

Apollo,
April 1991, pp 252-257, fig. 1: the article

draws upon University College archives and
provides a valuable account of the personalities

involved in the negotiations to create The Slade,

following Slade’s bequest.

11.
G Reitlinger,

The Economics of Taste,
Vol II

(London, 1963), p 452.

12.
A Hartshorne,

Old English Glasses
(London, 1897).

13.
Reg No. 69, 1-20, 17, see Sir Hercules Read, ‘Two

Anglo-Venetian Glasses’,
The Burlington Magazine,

XLVIII (1926), p 186 ff, plate B; R J Charleston,
`Dutch Decoration of English Glass’,
Transactions

of the Society of Glass Technology
(1957), XLI, pp

241 f; also
Masterpieces of Glass,
op cit, No 249, with

bibliography.

14.
Slade Catalogue

(London, 1869 & 1871), p 158, No

903, fig 258; it measures 10.5in; the translation of

Frans Greenwood’s poem is given as follows: The

juice of the grape, that is pleasantly sweet, Solomon
(Prov.
la,1) calls a mocker; he who drinks greedily,

eats gluttonously, and is (constantly) hobnobbing,

soon becomes an idiot and a fool.’
Furthermore, as a result of a misconception shared

by Felix Slade and others, the decoration of the

bowl is wrongly stated to be ‘etched with the

diamond and acid, in the manner of chalk or

stipple engraving…’. For a colour illustration, see
Five Thousand Years of Glass,
op cit, p 186, plate

242, where it is photographed next to another
stippled glass — signed:

F. Greenwood f

1738.
When

the executors of the late Felix Slade presented the

latter in June 1869, the glass itself was assumed to
be ‘Dutch’.

15.
Slade
Catalogue

(London, 1869 & 1871), p 158, No

902: ht 6.5 in.

16.
F G AM Smit, ‘A comparison between stipple-

engravings of David Wolff and those of an

anonymous stippler’,
Christie’s sale catalogue of the

Bradford Collection,
4 June 1985, pp 38-39; also, F

G A M Smit in, C R S Sheppard and J P Smith,

Engraved Glass
(London, 1990), p 66 ff.; F GAM

Smit,
Uniquely Dutch Eighteenth-century Stipple-

engravings on Glass
(Peterborough, 1993),

pp.19-20.

17.
Hugh Tait,
‘Wolff

glasses in an English private

collection’,
The Connoisseur,

June 1968, pp 99-108,

figs 1-2; photographs of the two drawings, delayed

because the Leyden archives were being moved to a

new building, could not be published in 1968

alongside the discussion but are now included here
(figs. 10
&
12).

18.
H E van Gelder,

Glas en Ceramick
(Amsterdam,

1955) p 45, plate XXXI,I.

19.
The ms bill dated 2 March 1775 (preserved in the

Gemeentelijke Archiefdienst, Leyden):

Verschot

aen

Nieuwe

port van de teckening

Een doosje voor ‘t pocaal

voor ‘t pocaal en vragt
Vragt van de gepointeerde pocaal

aen Delfos

aen D.Wolf [sic]

f 66 — —

20.
Wilfred Buckley,
D Wolff and the Glasses that he

engraved
(London, 1935), pp 18-20, plates 1-9; a

tenth signed and dated glass bears the date 1788
(see
Catalogus van Noord — en Zuidnederlands Glas,

Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (1962), No 220).
pocaal.

—4—..
—4—..

2 —6—..

—6—..

10 —10— ..

52 —10– ..

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

21.
F W Hudig, An
Essay on Dutch Glass Engravers

(Plymouth, 1926). p 21.

22.
Slade Catalogue

(London, 1869 & 1871), p 157, No

901.

23.
For a recent expert summary of the inconclusive

evidence concerning the production of a lead-glass

in the English manner during the second half of the

eighteenth century in The Netherlands, see P C
Ritsema van Eck and H M Zijlstra-Zweens,
Glass in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam,
Vol I

(Zwolle, 1993), pp 113-114, where it is argued that

‘although it is true that many wine-glasses were

imported from England, the English had no
monopoly of this genre.’ Nevertheless, the related

catalogue entries (nos 224-240) demonstrate that
the products of these continental ‘imitators’ have
not yet been reliably identified and, in the relevant

areas, cannot be distinguished from the English

glasses.

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Peter Layton

BRITISH STUDIO GLASS

V
II
Based on a paper read to the Circle on

18 February 1993

I am speaking at an interesting time in the evolution

of Glass Art in Britain, one of mixed fortunes, for on the

one hand, we have at the new Crafts Council Gallery (in
Pentonville Road, Islington, London, Ni) the first

important exhibition of British studio glass in more
than a decade, while on the other, Opus I, the sole

major outlet for glass in this country (with the

exception of Jeannette Hayhurst) has just closed its

doors, another negative statistic of the current
recession.*

The modern studio glass movement is just entering

its third decade. It is only thirty short years since

Harvey Littleton introduced ‘hot glass’ into the
American crafts revival that began during the post-
World War II era, and in that time his inspiration has

developed into an international resurgence in all forms
of glassmaking as a medium to convey personal

imagery.

In 1960, Ada Polak observed in an oft-quoted passage

in her excellent and important book,
Modern Glass,

that: ‘Some industrial designers who work with equal

ease in many materials, have produced excellent glass.
At times, however, one feels that their creations are the
product of the drawing board rather than of a deep and

excited experience of glass and that the field of glass

design is becoming dangerously narrowed down…We

look forward to the time when artists will again apply
the full force of their talents to the understanding of

glass and the exploration of its aesthetic potentialities,

and give us fully orchestrated symphonies, not merely

chamber music.’

Neither Ada nor anyone else could have foreseen the

extent to which her yearnings would be realised in the

years to follow. In this period when science fiction and
reality have threatened to merge, the studio glass

movement has represented one of the few optimistic

signposts ‘back to the future’, in reversing the trends of
automation, factory closures and lost skills.

To reiterate, it is a mere 30 years since the historic

seminar at the Toledo Museum, at which Harvey

Littleton, a practising American potter and teacher, and
Dominic Labino, a brilliant glass technologist,

collaborated to demonstrate the potential of ‘hot glass’

as a medium for the individual artist craftsperson.

These two men with widely differing viewpoints and
experience, Littleton providing the inspiration and

Labino the know-how, showed that glass could be
produced from simple equipment. This was made

possible through a simple but essential technical

breakthrough, namely the advent of the one-man day-

* At the time of going to press, it is good to note the opening of the new ‘Studio Glass Gallery’ at 63 Connaught Street, London, W2, and news
of the projected National Glass Centre in Sunderland.

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

Figure 1

Freeblown forms 1994.

(Courtesy of Dale Chihuly, Honolulu Academy Arts;

photo Russell Johnson)

tank furnace which, by contrast with the normally huge
industrial pot-furnaces, created the opportunity to melt

say 50 or 100 pounds of glass instead of several tons.
From then on, virtually anyone could melt and blow

glass. This may seem straightforward today, in an era of
highly sophisticated furnaces, but at the time the results

seemed miraculous and were reflected in the

enthusiasm and excitement that were generated.

In 1963, Littleton established the first hot glass

programme in the Art Department of the University of

Wisconsin. Amongst his students there were many who
have become leading figures in contemporary glass,

including such luminaries as Marvin Lipofsky, Dale
Chihuly (fig. 1), Fritz Dreisbach and Sam Herman (fig.

2) The latter came to Britain in 1965 on a Fulbright

Scholarship, first to be supervised by Helen Turner at
the Edinburgh College of Art and later, as a research

fellow at the Royal College of Art, there to introduce the
`small is beautiful’ technology. In 1969, Herman was

involved in the establishment of The Glasshouse in

Covent Garden under the aegis of Graham Hughes,
then chairman of the British Crafts Centre. For the first

time in Britain this offered a workshop for RCA

graduates and others (including myself), as well as

providing a specialist sales outlet and an opportunity
for the public to see free-blown glass being made. These

RCA alumni included Steven Newell (fig. 3), David

Taylor (fig. 4), Annette Meech, Dillon Clarke, Jane
Bruce and John Cook, while Pauline Solven (fig. 6) was

the first manager of The Glasshouse.

At the outset, artists wished to do everything for

themselves. Today it is acknowledged that the more

conventional way of working in a team, each of whom

has specialist skills, often enables the production of

more complex forms and a more sophisticated use of

colours and finishes. Of course, each approach is valid.

Figure 2

Three freeblown forms, cased colour

and applied relief decoration, circa 1969-70.

(Courtesy of Sam Herman)

THE GLASS CIRCLE FOURNAL 8

Wendy Evans, at that time Information Officer at the
Glass Manufacturers Federation, Mark Ransom of
Heals, Pan Henry at the Casson Gallery, and later,

Charles Hajdamach of Broadfield Glass Museum and
Michael Robinson of the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

The year 1976 was particularly important for British

studio glass. The Crafts Council organised the
tremendously successful International Hot Glass

Symposium, in conjunction with the Royal College of
Art, giving a much-needed boost and a fresh outlook,
not only here but throughout Europe. For many of us it

was the first real contact with almost legendary figures

such as Littleton and Labino, Erwin Eisch from
Germany, Sybren Valkema from Holland, Finn

Lynggaard from Denmark, Bertil Vallien from Sweden

and others, all working, demonstrating and discussing
their skills, experience and ideas. The presentation by

Figure 3

‘Jonah and the Whale’ — large iridised

plate, sandblasted design (Courtesy of Steven Newell)

The view expressed in
Crafts
in 1976 that ‘In the early

seventies there was too much haphazard achievement
in contemporary glass’ was probably true, but it took

little account of the anguish and pleasure from those
early endeavours, when we thought that the wonky

bubbles and lumpy `globby’ shapes we produced were
great works of art. Before that time, no-one had seen
much free-formed glass — thick sections, uneven forms

and a wild use of colour were common. Pieces were

often primitive, often crude, but they had a vitality and

strength that is frequently lacking in the more refined,

tasteful and professional work we produce today. The

early seventies were pioneering days: the budding

studio glassmaker had to design the furnace and

equipment required, find out about the material,
formulate recipes, invent and develop techniques, and

educate customers, thereby creating a market for his or
her work. Luckily, though they constantly complained

that glass needed special display and lighting, there

were nevertheless some enlightened galleries, craftshops

Figure 4

Five-stopper bottle, circa 1992.

and members of the public who responded and

Freeformed and carved glass. (Courtesy of David

encouraged those early fumbling efforts. They included

Taylor)

THE GLASS CIRCLE PURNAL

Figure 5

‘Torque’ — kiln cast glass and bronze,

1992 (Courtesy of Keith Cummings)

Stanislav Libensky from Czechoslovakia was
particularly memorable for the monumental quality of

his art and for the rare opportunity it offered to see and

hear about his work and that of his contemporaries.

(On a more personal note, may I add that another
important event took place in 1976 — my studio the
London Glassblowing Workshop was established at

Rotherhithe.)

The Symposium had a galvanising effect and one

direct result was the subsequent formation of BAG
[British Artists in Glass] a.S a professional association of

studio glass makers. Under the guidance of John Cook,

BAG started in 1976 with thirteen full members rising
to two hundred or so at its peak. They included such

figures as Keith Cummings (fig. 5), Charles Bray,
Raymond Flavell, David Reekie, Colin Reid (fig. 7) and
David Kaplan. It is difficult to imagine what the current

glass scene would have been like without BAG, which

has provided a forum, a point of contact and
information exchange. Through its newsletter,

conferences and by virtue of the high quality of its

annual exhibition it became recognised as a major force
in European glass. Perhaps it has now outlived its

purpose, although its stated aim to educate the public

by presenting the highest standard of glass art is as
relevant and essential as ever. An initiative currently

exists to create a new organisation.

Today, despite the unfavourable economic climate

there are many artists working in glass who are making
a living from their glass, and some who thrive. Glass-

blowing still flourishes, and amongst so many I cite Neil

Wilkin, Simon Moore (fig. 8) and David Kaplan (fig. 9).

Beyond this there is a great diversity of approach,
including kiln forming (fusing and/or slumping glass

over a former) (see Brian and Jenny Blanthorn, fig. 10)

and kiln casting by the lost wax process. They have
parallels in ancient times but have been revived/re-

invented in recent years. The possibilities are rich and

diverse, and have the advantage that costs are generally

less than hot glass. However, one disadvantage can be
the limitation of scale, as annealing to reduce internal

Figure 6

‘Picasso Bowls’, 1995.

(Courtesy of Pauline Solven)

Figure 7

R 257, Height 48 cm, Width 26 cm,

1987, No 90/1702.
(Courtesy of Colin Reid/Crafts Council)

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 8

Medusa-like candlestick, freeblown.

(Courtesy of Simon Moore)

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 10

Bowl, 40 x 40 x 8.5 cm, P 181C, 1993.

(Courtesy of f 5 and B Blanthorn; photo Alistair Smith)

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 9

`Graar bowl, 1986.

(Courtesy of David Kaplan and Annica

Sandstrom/Crafts Council)

Figure 11

‘South West Leap’, fused cast glass, 24

cm high, 1993.
(Courtesy of Keith Brocklehurst)

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 12

‘Metamorphosis’ — fused glass strands

and flat glass, 1991.
(Courtesy of Keiko Mukaide)

Figure 13

‘Fruit dish’ — triple cased plate, sand-

blasted design.
(Courtesy of Gayle Matthias)

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 14

‘Pyramid’: Sculpture, Novy Bor. Hot

cast modular construction, 1988.
(Courtesy of Peter Layton; blown element by Rene

Roubicek and Petr Novotny)

stresses can take weeks or even months. Artists in this
field include Keith Brocklehurst, Keiko Mukaide, Keith

Cummings and Gayle Matthias (figs. 11, 12, 5 & 13).

For greater flexibility, most glassblowing studios melt

clear glass, although coloured glasses may be achieved

by a variety of techniques such as rolling the hot glass in
powdered colour with fusion achieved by reheating in

the gloryhole. Regarding my own work, the problems of

display and lighting transparent glass so as to display it
effectively inspired the iridescent surface of many of my

early pieces. The iridescence enhances the piece under

any lighting conditions as well as bringing out any
nuances. Important stimuli for me have been aspects of

the marine form, such as the intricate patterning of

shells and the infinite variety and colour of fish. More
recent developments have included the creation of free-

form paperweights with layers of colour between

successive clear overlays, designed to capture the
freedom and tranquillity of a country scene.
Figure 15

‘Opening’ — cut flat glass modules and

patinated copper.

(Courtesy of Peter Layton and Simon Moss)

Among the more significant events in my career have

been the opportunities offered by the symposia at Novy

Bor in Czechoslovakia to build artistic works on an

architectural scale, such as the 2.5 metre ‘Pyramid’
(fig. 14). Working at Novy Bor inspired modular

construction techniques which allowed forms to be

designed with simplicity but assembled with speed. This

has led on to many other pieces, several of which have

been produced in collaboration with Simon Moss (fig.
15).

What drives the modern glass artist to work with this

temperamental yet seductive material, and from what

do they derive their inspiration? Scandinavia has

significantly influenced glassmakers such as Rachael

Woodman (fig. 18), Ray Flavell and Clare Henshaw,

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL S

Figure 16

‘Portals of Illusion’ – Sculpture: 14 foot

cube, dichroic glass glued to sheet glass construction,

1989.
(Courtesy of Peter Aldridge/Corning Glass)

although the sensuous clarity of Flavell differs
enormously from the vivid personal fantasy of

Henshaw (figs. 19 and 20). Mythologies and ancient

civilisations have directed the development of Liz
Lowe’s work (fig. 21) and similarly Keith Cummings

(fig. 5) while Anna Dickinson (fig. 22) is inspired by
ethnic themes and the richness of metallic patinas.

There are artists who must plan every detail of their

work carefully from the very beginning, and others who
prefer to open the annealer to see if something magical
has happened. Some of Tessa Clegg’s work, for

example, has been based on a paper-folding exercise
(fig. 23) although her more recent pieces are influenced

by architectural decoration and Norman and
Romanesque patterns. Alison Kinnaird’s engraved glass

has an almost classical serenity (fig. 24) while the

precision of Ronald Pennell’s work (fig. 25) reflects his
Figure 17

Detail from architectural screen.

(Courtesy of Alexander Beleschenko)

original training as a gem-cutter. Stephen Proctor’s

blown glass forms were developed for engraving, and
evolved into sculptural forms (fig. 26) concerned with

balance and the entrapment of light. These concerns are
also shared by Peter Aldridge and Alex Beleschenko,

who has extended horizons in the architectural glass
field with his lustrous glass screens, such as his recent

commission for the atrium at St John’s College, Oxford
(fig. 17). Peter Freeman chooses neon as his medium

(fig. 28) while Sara McDonald exemplifies artists who

welcome the unexpected in her imaginative use of
metallic inclusions in her glass (fig. 27).

Amongst so many glassmakers of note, I should like

to single out the casting of Libensky, Colin Reid (fig 6),

and also David Reekie, whose work is characterised by

an ironic macabre humour illustrating the human

condition (fig. 29). Danny Lane’s ‘tough’ flat glass

assemblages (fig. 30) are exceptional, as is Diana

Hobson’s
pate de verre

(fig. 31). A winner of the prized

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 18

Cased turquoise bowl with bevelled

rim.
(Courtesy of Rachael Woodman)
Figure 19

‘Biotech’ — assemblage with blown and

flat glass elements, No 86/6086, 1986.
(Courtesy of Raymond Flavell/Crafts Council)

Figure 20

`Fool with Flower’: Triple-cased colour,

engraved. Height 29 cm x 27 cm, 1990.
(Courtesy of Clare Henshaw)

Figure 21

‘Inca Jars’, 1988.

(Courtesy of Liz Lowe)

Figure 24

Rostra’ — engraved glass.

(Courtesy of Alison Kinnaird)

Figure 22

Bowl in electroformed copper, gold

plated, carved and sandblasted, No 87/81 1 I.

(Courtesy of Anna Dickinson/ Crafts Council)

Figure 23

Two kilncast bowls. Diameters 15 cm

and 28 cm, 1988.

(Courtesy
of

Tessa Clegg)

TI-IE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

100

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 25

Engraved bowl, No 84/2647, 1986.

(Courtesy of Ronald Pennell/Crafts Council)

Figure 26

‘Universal Rhythm’ — blown and cut

form with sandblasting and prismatic cutting. Base

70 cm diameter, piece 32.5 cm high, 1985.

(Courtesy of Stephen Proctor)

101

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Figure 27

Slumped, laminated dish with

metallic inclusions. Diameter 60 cm, 1995.

(Courtesy of Sara McDonald)

Figure 28

‘Spiral’ – painted neon, 1985.

(Courtesy of Peter Freeman)

102

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Figure 29

`A Pair of Kings’ — kilncast, painted

Figure 30

`Chair’ in stacked flat glass, No

wood, 1990.

87/8325.

(Courtesy of David Reekie)

(Courtesy of Danny Lane/Crafts Council)

Rakow award from the Corning Museum of Glass, she,

like Reekie, has taught at the Pilchuck Glass School near

Seattle. The school is renowned as an experimental
centre, with its international resident and visiting

artists/instructors, an award-winning campus set in

1500 acres of trees and farmland, and twenty-four hour

access to its facilities. It is said that an intensive three-
week course at Pilchuck is worth a year at a normal

college.

I conclude with the words of the great glass maker

Maurice Marinot, ‘To be a glassmaker is to blow
transparent matter by the side of a burning furnace…to

shape sensitive material into simple lines by a rhythm

suited to the very nature of the glass…I think that a
good piece of glassware preserves, at its best, a form

reflecting the human breath which has shaped it and

that its shape must be a moment in the life of the glass

fixed in the instant of cooling.’

Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to all who have given permission to

reproduce illustrations of their work here, especially to Kay

Harris and the Crafts Council for permission to reproduce

figs 7, 9, 19, 22, 25, 30 and also to Kate Crowe for her editorial
help. Lack of space has obliged me to limit the selection of

artists featured in my original lecture, but readers wishing to
explore the diversity of current glass should look at
Contemporary British Glass
(Crafts Council, 1993) and the

forthcoming Peter Layton,
Glass Art
(September 1996 A & C

Black, University of Washington Press).

103

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

Figure 31

‘Bent’ Bird’ — pate de verre, animal hair and limestone, 1990

(Courtesy of Diana Hobson)

104

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

1
2)
r

–
1′ 1 A ki

P if

Colour Plate

Plate I of the Slade Catalogue (1871) including (on

the left,) a very early kohl tube (eye-paint container) in the form of a

palm column, with its original glass applicator, made in Egypt during
the 18th-19th Dynasty (c 1375-1275 BC) and (on the right) a

container for scented oils made on the island of Rhodes
(c 550-400 BC).

105

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

DELOMOSNE
& SON LTD

FINE ANTIQUES

COURT CLOSE

NORTH WRAXALL

CHIPPENHAM

WILTSHIRE SNI4. 7AD

TEL: BATH (012.25) 891505

FAX: BATH (012.25) 891907

lridised glass bowl with
silver
and
slate base by Peter

Layton and Howard Fenn

One of
many awards and presentation pieces commissioned from London Glassblowing

Workshop

LONDON GLASSBLOWING WORKSHOP
Makers
of Fine Contemporary Glass

Art

7 The Leather Market, Weston Street, London SE 1 3ER Telephone 0171 403 2800 Facsimile 0171 403 7778
The gilding of the James Giles atelier on various English glasses

of the third quarter of the 18th Century

Christine Bridge

18th century collectors glass and
19th century coloured glass

A ,41.

.•

‘ Y
–
4

4
$ 1

78 Castelnau, London’ S-W13.9EX

by appointment oni

Tel/Fax 0181- 74
bile 0831 126668
THE CLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL 8

E.S. PHILLIPS & SONS

STAINED GLASS SPECIALISTS

99 Portobello Road, London W11 2QB

Tel: 0171 229 2113 Fax: 01 71 229 1963
CONTACT NEIL PHILLIPS

Also at JOHN HARDMAN STUDIOS

Lightwood House, Lightwoods Park,Hagley Road West,
Birmingham B67 5DP

Tel: 0121 429 7609 Fax: 0121 420 2316

CONTACT DAVID WILLIAMS

ANTIQUE STAINED GLASS, NEW DESIGNS COMMISSIONED,
REPAIRS, ALTERATIONS AND ADVICE

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Gerald Sattin
Ltd

14 King Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6QU
Fax / Tel, 0171-493 6557

A matching pair of George Ill Beilby Wine Glasses each with

an ogee bowl decorated with a floral garland in white enamel
over a double series opaque twist stem and conical foot.

The enamel almost certainly by Mary Beilby

Circa 1765 Height 5
1
/2″

See ‘The Ingenious Beilbys’ by James Rush, plates 51a and 82a

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOLIRNAL

162 New Bond Street London W1Y 9PA
0171 499 8228

ass a o e ys

From the J.R. Rinnan

Collection or Dutch Glass, Sothelw’s London.

1111 November 1995:

A line 1)111(
.
11 Calligrapitic Goblet 1w

Willem van Heemskerk. dated 1{1811. (20.5cm)

tind in Important Dutch

III

POrtrail
Flute engraved in
For further details about

Sotheby’s Glass sales contact

Simon Cottle: European Ceramics and Glass.
31 35 New Bond Street. London W IA 2A.A.

Tel. 0171 .108 5133. Christina Donaldson.
Colonnade Ceramics and Glass

(1171 408 5070 or Philip I Iowell.
– ’10 VP
rt

‘

2.ka
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flish
olustsm•

01131.ii.W.ALI

MULE/Arils*

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THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL

HOWARD PHILLIPS

Panel by Daniel Lindtmeyer of Schaffhausen, 1589.
A

variation of

an Ink-drawing, 1589, in Zurich

c
io Midland Bank, 19 Marylebone High Street, London W1M 4BD

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

cio Midland Bank, 19 Marylebone High Street London W1M 4BD

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

MEMORANDUM

From:
John A. Brooks

To:
The Glass Circle

I would like to inform members of the Glass Circle that, after 25 years, I have retired from active

dealing in antique glass; a pursuit which has given me lasting satisfaction. There is no doubt that
I shall miss this side of my activities which has made me so many friends.

However, I have no intention of disappearing from an arena that has given me so much pleasure

and I regard the future not as retirement but rather as an opportunity to expand my other
interests. These include lecturing, writing and , by keeping abreast of developments in the world

of glass collecting, the execution of valuations and other glass related commissions. I shall also
continue to pursue my interest in glass through my involvement with the Glass Circle and the

Glass Association.

If there is any glass related matter about which I could offer help or advice please contact me.

2 Knights Crescent, Rothley, Leicestershire LE7 7PN

Tel: (0116) 230 2625

WILLIAM MACADAM

DEALER IN 18th and 19th CENTURY DRINKING GLASSES

EXHIBITOR AT MAJOR AN TIQUES FAIRS
VIEWING STRICTLY BY APPOINTMENT ONLY AT

86 PILRIG STREET, EDINBURGH EH6 5AS
0131 553 1364

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

BY APPOINTMENT TO HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN
GLASS RESTORERS

Wilkinson plc

CHANDELIER MANUFACTURERS ‘ GLASS RESTORERS

1 GRAFTON STREET

5 CATFORD HILL

LONDON W1X 3LB

LONDON SE6 4NU

Tel: 0171 495 2477

Tel: 0181 314 1080

Fax: 0171 491 1737

Fax: 0181 690 1524

WE HAVE EXTENSIVE FACILITIES FOR THE REPAIR,
RESTORATION AND MANUFACTURE OF

GLASSWARE AND ART METALWORK. ANTIQUE AND

REPRODUCTION CHANDELIERS AVAILABLE FROM STOCK.

NIEUWE SPIEGELSTRAAT

55,

TELEPHONE
020 –
6264066

Masonic goblet, stipple-engraved
by L. Adams. On the bowl an

engraving of a lady with a cloth

tied on her mouth, holding a

level, a set-square, a plumb and a
pair of compasses, sitting on a

square block, surrounded by
masonic symbols.

Adams was the last Dutch
stipple-engraver who worked in

the tradition of the eighteenth,

century.

Signed on pontilmark: Adams Fecit
Provenance: The Netherlands

Date: Circa 1800

Height: 18.4cm

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOURNAL 8

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

MALLETT
ESTABLISHED 1865

One of
a pair of claret jugs made by Perrin Geddes & Co. of Warrington. Circa 1810.

Engraved with the crest of Charles llth Duke of Norfolk

MALLETT & SON (ANTIQUES) LTD., 141 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON WI Y OBS.
TELEPHONE : 0171-499 7411 FAX : 0171-495 3179

AND AT BOURDON HOUSE, 2 DAVIES STREET, LONDON W I Y 1LU

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

#umeruate Antiquts
Wing Commander B.G. Thomas M.B.E. R.A.F. Reid.

(Specialist in 18th and early 19th Century English Drinking Glasses, Decanters,
Cut & Coloured ‘Bristol’ and ‘Nailsea’ Glass.
Also Bijouterie and Scent Bottles.)

Fine Jacobite wine glass. The round fun-

nel bowl with a portrait of the Young
Pretender in profile within a laurel leaf.

Flanked on one side by a six petalled

Jacobite Rose and single bud, and on the

other by a thistle with a star in between.
On a stem with a multiple spiral airtwist.
Plain domed foot. Height 14cm c.1750

Very important Jacobite wine glass from

the Oxburgh Hall find. The large round
funnel bowl engraved with a six-petalled

Jacobite Rose, two buds, an oak leaf and

“Fiat” on a plain stem with air tear and
plain conical foot. The foot engraved

with the Prince of Wales’s Feathers.
Fine Heavy Baluster Wine Glass with a

mushroom knop. Height 17.6cm c.1720
Rare Cider Glass on opaque twist stem.

Height 15.5cm c.1765
Fine Mead Glass. Height 12cm c.1720

Pair of Irish spirit decanters of ovoid

shape, marked underneath “Cork Glass
Co.” Height 19.5cm c.1810

Tapered decanter engraved “White
Wine”with floral cartouche. Height

24cm c.1800.
Mallet shaped plain decanter engraved

“Port”. Height 23cm c. 1790

6, RADSTOCK ROAD

MIDSOMER NORTON

BATH BA3 2AJ
Tel: 01761 412686

Mobile: 0585 088022

Shop open by appointment only. I live on the premises. 24
–
hour telephone service.

Trains to Bath met by arrangement
VISA

LAPADA

Jeanette Hayhurst

Fine Glass

32A Kensington Church Street, London W8
0171-938 1539

Specialist in all manner of drinking glasses

from Ravenscroft to today’s contemporary art
ti

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

Mrs M.E. CRICK CHANDELIERS

166 KENSINGTON CHURCH STREET, LONDON W8 4BN
Tel: 0171-229 1338 Fax: 0171-792 1073

An eighteenth Century Chandelier, of wrythen glass, with sixteen
branches: eight for candles and eight for carrying spine

ornaments, dressed with chains and festoons of pear-shaped
prisms and pear pendants. Height: 4’6″Width: 2’6″

PLEASE TELEPHONE FOR AN APPOINTMENT

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

EUROPEAN GLASS
AND CERAMICS

Newcastle, Light Baluster ca 1745. The coat of arms of
the Seven Provinces. English Glass, Dutch engraving

H.C.
VAN VLIET

ANTIQUAIR

Nieuwe Spiegelstraat 74, Spiegelkwartier

1017 DH Amsterdam – Holland – Tel. 020-622.77.82

Patricia Harbottle

wine related antiques
1827 SCOTTISH SEALED BOTTLE WITH TWO

18TH CENTURY SPANISH “LA GRANJA ”
GLASSES

Stand 16, Geoffrey Van’s Arcade,
107 Portobello Road,
London W11 2QB

Tel: 0171 731 1972

Fax: 0171 731 3663

Mobile: 0831 210901

GLASS FOR USE – GLASS TO COLLECT

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

THE STONE GALLERY

DEALERS IN FINE ANTIQUE AND MODERN
PAPERWEIGHTS

93
THE HIGH STREET,
BURFORD, OXFORDSHIRE

OX18 4QA

Established 1918

Tel & Fax: 01993 823302

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

210’°(ClIENTUIR,’
1
CILASS
Vase by

Keith Murray for

Stevens and Williams

NIGEL BENSON 0181-806 7068

UNIT 7, THE ANTIQUE CENTRE, 58/60 KENSINGTON CHURCH STREET,
LONDON W8 4DB

0171-376 0425

A diamond

and pillar cut

chandelier piece

reproduced to

replace original
R P CROWE

Dedicated craftsman in the

restoration and manufacture

of fine glassware

Trowbray House
The Leather Market

108 Weston Street

London SE1 308

Telephone 0171 378 9923

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOLIIINIAL 8

ALAN MILFORD
DOLPHIN ANTIQUES

155 PORTOBELLO ROAD
LONDON W11 2DY

Open Saturdays only 10am – 5pm

Specialist in English 17th/18thC drinking glasses

An 18th century Irish cordial or wine glass of typical
form

THE GLASS CIRCLE LOURNAL

Ceramics and Glass
at Christie’s

Three canery-yellow-twist wine-glasses, circa 1765.

Sold in London for 212,650, 213,225 and £8,050 respectively.

The Ceramics and Glass Departments at Christie’s

King Street and South Kensington hold sales
throughout the year.

For further information about buying or selling at

auction please contact Rachel Russell (King Street)
on (0171) 389 2302

or Paul Tippett (SouthKensington)

on (0171) 321 3232.

For catalogue sales please contact (0171) 389 2820.
CHRISTIE’S

8 King Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6QT
Tel: (0171) 839 9060 Fax: (0171) 389 2215

85 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 3LD
Tel: (0171) 581 7611 Fax: (0171) 321 3321

THE GLASS CIRCLE IOU REIAL

FINR GLASS AT PHILLIPS

A
selection of glasses from
an important
collection of English 18th

Century Drinking

Glasses

sold in London on 13th
September 1995.

P
hillips sell all kinds of glass, from Roman to

modern. Whatever your interests, we have

catalogues to tempt every collector, from specialists
to beginner. For example, on 20th September 1995

we sold a large collection of Victorian pressed glass.

We sell antique and traditional glass every month at

101 New Bond Street. In addition specialised sales of

selected rarities and collectors items are held each
Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Art Nouveau

glass and the work of 20th Century designers can be
found in our sales of later Applied Arts held regularly

at Bond Street, while further 20th Century glass is
offered in quarterly sales at Phillips in Bayswater.

It is easy to find out more about Phillips sales.

Simply telephone 0171-629 6602 and ask to speak to

Jo
Marshall
who specialises in antique glass, or to

Fiona
Baker who prepares 20th Century sales. And

remember — Phillips can sell for you too.

Philli

INTERNATIONAL

AUCTIONEERS &

,r
rrr

—

LONDON BRUSSELS – GENEVA

NEW YORK • STOCKHOLM • ZURICH

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

SHEPPARD & COOPER LIMITED
11 St. George Street, London W1R 9DF
Tel: 0171-629 6489

Fax: 0171-495 2905

A fine goblet and cover, magnificently engraved in tiefschnitt with playful putti supporting swags of fruit and

flowers above a variety of creatures on a grassy ground. The funnel bowl is set into a flared conical section cut

with flutes, on a knop over an inverted baluster decorated with stylised leaves, on an engraved and cut foot. The

doomed lid has a replacement finial in the shape of a silver snake curled round on radiating leaves.
Date: 1710 -1715

Silesian (Hermsdorf). The engraving possibly the workshop of Friedrich Winter.
Z. 0. Drahotova,
Barokill Rezane Sklo 1600 -1760
(Prague 1989), p.40, p1.22

Produced in association with the

V&A and Coming Museums

Produced by the Art of Memory

1
n
111•10

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

GI
The Story of

A CD-ROM for Windows and Macintosh

The Story of Glass is a beautiful and intriguing history and tour of glass mak-
ing inspired by the Glass Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum in

London and the Corning Museum of Glass in New York State.

It is an interactive CD-ROM, rich in content with illustra-
tions, sound, and over forty five minutes of video show-/

ing glass making techniques.

This is an essential purchase for collectors, fine art /
historians, librarians, and an ideal gift for anyone

interested in beautiful objects or the craft of

glass making.

The Story of Glass is also on view as an interac-
tive display in the Victoria
&
Albert Museum

in London and the Corning Museum of Glass,
New York State glass collections.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: MPC Level 2: 486SX processor
or higher; 4MB RAM; 120MB hard-disk storage; SVGA

and graphics adapter (256 colours minimum); multisession,
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Windows 3.1x or later, mouse.

1 860 45000 8 CD-ROM (MPC, Macintosh) 1995 £49.99 +VAT

Direct Order Form

Order direct from: Sophie Foster, Butterworth-Heinemann, Linacre

House, Jordan Hill, Oxford, OX4 8DP, UK. Orders can be placed direct by
telephoning our Customer Services Department on (01933) 414000.

Please supply the following title:

Qty Title

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Pricei

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Please add £250 for UK and European surface post delivery (add £6.00 for air mail delivery)

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CONTENTS:
Glass makers;

Short Stories;
Glass around the World;

All Sorts of Glass;
Maps;

The Making of Glass;
Glass Makers;

Glossary;

Acknowledgements;

Help.

Lauric Lcip

36, High Street,

Oxford OX1
4AN

Tel: (01865) 244197

English 18th & 19th century wine glasses and tableware

Hours of business: 10.30am to 5.30pm Monday to Saturday.
Closed Thursday & Sunday
TI I E CLASS C:IRCLE JO L’I1NAI.

THE GLASS CIRCLE fOURNAS.

What else but Waterford?
he interrupts the football

)

cries at the opera,

and makes a room come alive.

HEART
sui
.
ATIED

TRAy

WATERFORD
CRYSTAL

W.,,r10.,1Cry,.1

Georgina Jay

18th & 19th Century Decanters & Glasses

Crown Arcade, 119 Portobello Road, W11. 0171 792 3619. (Saturday only).
By appointment during the week: 0181 347 9626.

21 SAINT ALBANS PLACE N 1 ONX

OPEN

TUESDAY – FRIDAY 10am – opm

SATURDAY 11 am – 5 pm

ANGEL TUBE
THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

THE GLASSHOUSE GLASSBLOWING WORKSHOP GALLERY

DECORATIVE ARTS CACIQUE

Bonhams hold an annual sale of
Lalique Glass

and three sales a year of

Art Deco & Art Nouveau
including: Daum, Galle

and other important designers.

If you would like to know more about other

sales, we offer or further information on buying
or selling at auction, please contact:

Eric Knowles or Fiona Gallagher
0171 393 3942

Catalogue Enquiries (quoting GCI):
Ruth Sutherland – 0171 393 3933

Bonhams, Montpelier Street,

Knightsbridge, London SW7
I HH

BONHAMS
LONDON’S MOST ENTERPRISING AUCTION HOUSE

TI-11: GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL 8

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

PREVIOUS GLASS CIRCLE PUBLICATIONS

The Glass Circle I

THE HOARE BILLS FOR GLASS by W A Thorpe

ENAMELLING AND GILDING ON GLASS by R J Charleston

GLASS AND BRITISH PHARMACY 1600-1900 by J K Crellin and J R Scott

ENGLISH ALE GLASSES 1685-1830 by P C Trubridge

SCENT BOTTLES by Edmund Launert

The Glass Circle 2

A GLASSMAKER’S BANKRUPTCY SALE by R J Charleston
THE BATHGATE BOWL by Barbara Morris

ENGLISH ALE GLASSES, GROUP 3,

Tall Balusters and Flute Glasses for Champagne and Ale, by P C Trubridge

THE PUGH GLASSHOUSES IN DUBLIN by Mary Boydell

GLASS IN 18TH CENTURY NORWICH by Sheena Smith

WHO WAS GEORGE RAVENSCROFT? by Rosemary Rendel

HOW DID GEORGE RAVENSCROFT DISCOVER LEAD CRYSTAL?

by D C Watts

The Glass Circle 3

THE APSLEY PELLATTS by J A H Rose
DECORATION OF GLASS

PART 4: PRINTING ON GLASS. PART 5: ACID-ETCHING
by R J Charleston

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

THE JACOBITE ENGRAVERS by G B Seddon

`MEN OF GLASS’: A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE DE BONGAR FAMILY

OF THE 16TH & 17TH CENTURIES
by G Bungard

ENGLISH ALE GLASSES, GROUP 4

Ale/beer glasses of the 19th century by P C Trubridge

The Glass Circle 4

SOME ENGLISH GLASS ENGRAVERS:
LATE 18TH-EARLY 19TH CENTURY

by R J
.
Charleston

ENGLISH ROCK CRYSTAL GLASS, 1878-1925 by Ian Wolfenden

REVERSE PAINTING ON GLASS by Rudy Eswarin

THE MANCHESTER GLASS INDUSTRY by Roger Dodsworth

THE RICKETTS FAMILY AND THE PHOENIX GLASSHOUSE, BRISTOL
by Cyril Weeden

The Glass Circle 5

THE “AMEN” GLASSES by R
J
Charleston and Geoffrey Seddon

GLASSES FOR THE DESSERT I. Introductory by R J Charleston
GLASSES FOR THE DESSERT II.

18th century English Jelly and Syllabub Glasses
by Tim Udall

POSSETS, SYLLABUBS AND THEIR VESSELS by Helen McKearin

JACOBITE GLASSES AND THEIR INSCRIPTIONS by F J Lelievre

THE FLINT GLASS HOUSES ON THE RIVERS TYNE AND WEAR

DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
by Catherine Ross

THE GLASS CARAFE: 18TH-19TH CENTURY by John Frost

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

The Glass Circle 6

THE GLASS CIRCLE: A PERSONAL MEMOIR by Robert J Charleston
THE ELEMENTS OF GLASS COLLECTING by John M Bacon

GLASS IMITATING ROCK CRYSTAL AND PRECIOUS STONES-16TH &17TH CENTURY WHEEL
ENGRAVING AND GOLD RUBY GLASS
by Professor Dr Franz-Adrian Dreier

WILLIAM AND THOMAS BEILBY AS DRAWING MASTERS

by Robert J Charleston

THE FRENCH CONNECTION: THE DECORATIVE GLASS OF JAMES A JOBLING AND CO OF
SUNDERLAND DURING THE 1930S

by Kate Crowe

THE WINDMILLS: A NOTABLE FAMILY OF GLASSMAKERS

by Brian Moody

JOSEPH LOCKE AND HIS THREE CAREERS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA by Juliette K Rakow and Dr

Leonard S Rakow

THE WHITTINGTON LOVING CUP by Peter Dreiser

The Glass Circle 7

DR SYNTAX IN THE GLASSHOUSE by Cyril Weeden

19TH & 20TH CENTURY COMMEMORATIVE GLASS by Barbara Morris

FLASHED GLASS – AN ENGLISH FIRST? by Robert J Charleston
THREE WILLIAMITE GLASSES by Mary Boydell

A NOTE ON THE DISCOVERY OF TWO ENGRAVED GLASSES FROM THE PUGH GLASSHOUSE
by Mary Boydell

GLASS FROM 1850-1950 IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM by Judy Rudoe

SOME CHEMICAL AND PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ANCIENT GLASS AND THE POTENTIAL OF

SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS
by Dr Julian Henderson

THE GLASS CIRCLE JOURNAL

Also available

Strange and Rare. 50th Anniversary Exhibition Catalogue 1937-1987

Commemorative Exhibition Catalogue 1937-1962

Copies and prices of the above may be obtained from the Hon Secretary
Jo Marshall

9 Dobson Close

Swiss Cottage

LONDON NW6 4RS

EIGHT

ST APPOINTMENT

10 WM THE OLIEEN

GOLDSMITHS, SILVERSMITHS

&JEWELLERS
ASPRY
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LONDON
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SY APPOINTMENT

TO H M QUEEN ELIZASE7If

TO IT H. THE PRINCE OF WALES

THE DUE MOTHER

JEWELLERS, GOLDSMITHS

JEWELLERS

S SILVERSMITHS

ASPREY PLC

ASPHEY PLC

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r
fr-

or
•smawir:

111PP
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-…adormpo-

A baluster wineglass, English, c_1695. Height: 17.8cm (7in).

A red colour-twist wineglass, English, c.1760. Height: 12.5cm (6in)

A wheel-engraved air-twist wineglass inscribed ‘Prosperity to Fox Hunting’,
English, c.1760. Height: 20.3cms (8in).

An engraved Royal armorial light baluster goblet in the manner of Jacob Sang,
c.1760. Height: 18.4 (7
1
/4″)

ASPREY, 165-169
NEW BOND STREET, LONDON WlY OAR

Telephone 0171-493 6767

Fax: 0171-491 0384

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