Collectors' notes

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2005 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

A glass globe reproduced at the Warner House

Joyce Geary Volk, who wrote the fascinating article about the discovery and restoration of the unusual smalt wall treatment in the parlor bedchamber of the Warner House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (see pp. 66-71), has also written to us about her work on another mystery presented by the house. Listed in the front parlor in the inventory taken at the time of Jonathan Warner's death in 1814 was a "glass globe," but how big it might have been or what purpose it served were uncertain. Happily, her research unearthed sufficient clues to re-create the globe and its role. Volk writes:

In her useful book, At Home: The American Family, 1750-1870, Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett, quotes from letters and other records that document glass globes (some of them coated with mercury so that they were mirrored) used in American houses dating from 1771 to 1807; (1) and Arlene Palmer, a noted American glass expert, has told me about several inventory references to such globes. However, no surviving examples are known, nor are any paintings, prints, or other illustrations that picture them in use in this country in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. (2) Interestingly, however, several Dutch paintings of the late seventeenth century depict interiors that include hanging glass globes, among them Johannes Vermeer's Allegory of the Faith, illustrated at right.

Thomas M. Hardiman Jr., the keeper of the Portsmouth Athenaeum, remembered a mention of glass globes years ago in Alice Winchester's column "Riddles and Replies" in The Magazine ANTIQUES, and Elizabeth Stillinger helped me locate it in the September 1940 issue (pp. 134-136). Winchester was responding to a question about "witch balls" and described hollow glass spheres that were used as covers for pitchers, bowls, and so on and also as floats for fishing nets. She referred to Frederick William Hunter's Stiegel Glass (1914; reprinted Dover, New York, 1950), which discusses Henry William Stiegel's three glass factories in Pennsylvania between about 1765 and 1774. Illustrated as Figure 23 in Hunter is a glass globe 6 1/2 inches in diameter identified as a "White Flint Lamp Reflector" and described in the text (p. 209) as "[g]lobular, with short neck for cork ... [t]hese reflectors were intended to be filled with water and hung before a lamp."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

About the globular water container, Winchester remarked, "Hunter's suggestion is altogether plausible if we recall the water-filled globes, built into a pedestal with a handle, that were used by lacemakers of another day to concentrate light on their delicate work." Hunter, however, gives no source for his statement that the globe was meant to be water-filled, and I cannot see how this would add anything but weight to the already reflective surface of the glass. No cork is illustrated with his globe; a similar globe (with the same neck and no cork) is pictured in Jan Steen's Bordello Scene (c. 1665-1668; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), (3) suspended from a velvet ribbon, which would not have been possible if it were heavy with water.

In November 1996 I was in London and spoke with Frances Collard of the Victoria and Albert Museum, who told me there were no glass globes mentioned in English inventories of 1780 to 1820. Peter Thornton, who has written several tomes on interiors covering many countries and many ages, said the only glass globes he had ever seen were those in Dutch seventeenth-century paintings.

Jane Shadel Spillman of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, knew of no examples, but suggested I try the Broadfield House Glass Museum in Kingswinford, England. The keeper there, Roger Dodsworth, wrote, "In the price lists of English glass manufacturers in the early 19th century, you sometimes find references to articles called Watch Balls .... [t]hey were made of internally silvered glass, either clear or coloured, and were apparently suspended in the front window of a house to give a view of what was going on outside and perhaps to magnify the light inside."

In the end, we decided to model a re-creation of Jonathan Warner's "glass globe" on those pictured in the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. A Portsmouth artisan, George A. Cirocco of Salamandra Glass Studios, very generously offered to blow a globe of the appropriate size and give it to the house. It now hangs from the ceiling of the front parlor on a red velvet ribbon (covering Kevlar cord) like the one in Vermeer's painting and provides both good light reflection and the opportunity to "watch" neighborhood activity.

(1) Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett, At Home: The American Family, 1750-1870 (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1990), p. 156 and n. 18, 279.

(2) One mirrored ball, 8 3/8 inches in diameter, is in the Samuel E. Weir Collection and Library of Art in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. This may be a so-called watch ball, as discussed later.

(3) Reproduced and discussed in Peter C. Sutton et al., Love Letters: Dutch Genre Paintings in the Age of Vermeer (Frances Lincoln, London, 2003), pp. 168-169.