Irish glass

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2004 by Andy McConnell

No category of antiques can have generated a more spurious mythology than that surrounding Irish glass. Indeed, the legends and half-truths propagated by charlatans, frauds, and wishful thinkers have become so firmly established in the international consciousness that to assert the reality is to tempt derision and anger: Yet the indisputable fact remains that the many glassworks established across Ireland starting in 1783 found it easier to manufacture cheap, rudimentary table glass for the westward colonies than to compete with long-established British works for the domestic luxury market.

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Fine glassware was certainly produced in Ireland between 1783 and 1851, the precise lifespan of the Waterford Glass House (see Pl. VIII). However, surviving documentation, which includes customs statistics and eye-witness accounts, repeatedly emphasizes the prevalence of cheap molded wares over finery. Indeed, steam-driven cutting wheels, essential to the commercial application of the rich combinations of motifs widely but erroneously perceived as characteristic of "fine old Waterford glass," were absent from Ireland until 1818 and were not installed at Waterford until 1826. This was more than thirty years after their debut in an English glassworks, (1) and twenty years after a Swedish industrial spy observed them in use in Leith, Scotland. (2)

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The fact is that Irish glasshouses had more in common with their counterparts in the fledgling United States than with those in Britain. In both Ireland and America the development of the glass industry had suffered from British imperial policies that dictated that the colonies be treated as sources of raw materials and markets for finished goods rather than as centers of manufacturing. For example, British craftsmen were banned from settling abroad by a Parliamentary Act of 1719 that attempted to "Prevent the Inconveniences arising from Seducing Artificers in the Manufactures of Great Britain into Foreign Parts." (3) Symptomatic of such policies, British agents attempted to prevent John Frederick Amelung (1741 or 1742-1798) from sailing from Bremen, Germany, to Baltimore with a team of glassmakers in 1784, (4) and a prohibitive tax was imposed on Irish glass exported to mainland Britain between 1746 and 1783. (5)

The boom in Irish glassmaking that began at the end of the eighteenth century was both created and extinguished by political factors. Its initial impetus stemmed from fears that the Irish would follow the American example and revolt, which forced London into concessions. The most important of these was the grant of free trade in 1780, which allowed Irish goods to be exported without duty. The subsequent flowering in Irish glassmaking was marked by the establishment of about ten new glassworks over the following generation at various locations, including Waterford, Dublin, Cork (see Pls. I [right], IV), and Newry (see Pl. I [center]).

The bonanza was ultimately terminated for similar reasons. The first blow was the extension to Ireland in 1825 of the excise duty on glass, under which British glassmakers had suffered since 1745. This weight-related tax was imposed on all glassware intended for retail in the British Isles, although exports were exempt. Then, American protectionist import tariffs, which rose throughout the 1820s, gradually priced Irish glass out of the United States, its principal market. The final nail in the coffin was the Irish potato famine between 1845 and 1851, which destroyed the Irish economy and pushed its last surviving glasshouse, Waterford, into bankruptcy just months after participating at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London in 1851.

Like American glassmakers, those in Ireland suffered both from a lack of economies of scale and from shortages of the skills and materials that gave British manufacturers their commercial advantage. Glassware had been produced continuously in London, Newcastle, and Bristol since the late seventeenth century, and new centers were emerging around 1800 in Stourbridge, Birmingham, Manchester, and in Scotland. As with other trades, glassworkers moved freely around Britain, and a stream of apprentices continuously augmented the industry's pool of skills. Britain also benefited from the availability of investment capital, furnace coal, fireclay, lead, and fine sand. Most of these were unavailable in both Ireland and the United States at the time, so their glassmakers faced the added financial and logistical burden of having to import them. Irish and American glasshouses recruited British technical expertise, but glassworkers commanded wages two or three times more than those of workers in equivalent trades.

The obvious solution for both Irish and American makers was to avoid head-on competition with the British, and instead to target a wider public with a variety of lower-grade pieces, many of which were formed and decorated in molds. The resulting vessels not only required relatively limited skills from the workmen who blew them but reduced or even avoided the need for secondary decoration, such as cutting or engraving. This meant that much of the glassware produced in Ireland was of a similar standard to that created at several New England glassworks, such as that made by the Bristol emigre Thomas Cains (1779-1865) in Boston from 1812, and at the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company from 1825.