American glass in the Bohemian style

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1996 by Jane Shadel Spillman

The glass manufacture of Bohemia has obtained high celebrity for the taste of its form and the beauty of its colour....There is a delicate appreciation of tender hues of colour in these productions well worthy of attentive study; this elevates the simplest of them far above the gaudy vulgarities occasionally fabricated, and termed "Bohemian glass," and which are chiefly remarkable for the strong contrasts of deep colour, and abundant display of gilding upon their surface.(1)

At the time, most English and American glass companies were producing traditional colorless cut-glass tablewares. However, the Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue... of the Great Exhibition shows that several factories in the English Midlands were also producing colored wares in the Bohemian style,(2) and had been doing so for four or five years. In an exhibition in Manchester, England, in the winter of 1845-1846, the Richardson firm displayed blown-glass objects with two or more layers of colorless and colored glass in what were acknowledged as "laudable attempts to rival the produce of Bohemia."(3) And by 1839 the French firms of Saint Louis and Baccarat were both making colorless glass with colored layers.(4)

In the United States, imported Bohemian glass was popular by the late 1840s. The Boston Daily Journal of July 15, 1848, advertised "BOHEMIAN GLASS...ruby, blue, turquoise, and other tints." At the time, American companies were also experimenting with making this ware.(5) By 1847 William Leighton, the chief chemist at the New England Glass Company in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, was producing cased (then most often called plated) glass decorated with cutting, which the firm showed that year at the Fifth Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association in Faneuil Hall, Boston. The judges commented,

The colored and Plated Cut Glass, presented by the New England Glass Company, is superior to any heretofore manufactured in this Country, and deserves a mark of approbation as favorable, to say the least, as that which may be awarded to the Brooklyn company for its flint glass.

Until recently, the art of Plating Glass has not been understood in America; and many of the first attempts to produce it, were decided failures. The present specimens of Plated Cut-Glass, show, conclusively, that it can now be produced here, in as great perfection as in foreign countries, with this exception, that it will require more practical experience to produce that variety and exquisite beauty of color, which characterizes that manufactured in Bohemia.

The Engraving on Plated Glass, (which it is to be observed, is a different branch from the cutting,) is entirely a new process so far as this Country is concerned, (having never before, to our knowledge, been attempted in America.) and is executed with exquisite skill. The Engraving on Flint Glass, also, and the enamelling is of a character fully equal to any imported from foreign countries, which have come under our notice.(6)

In cased glass, the innermost layer is usually the thickest and is colorless while the outer layers are colored and thinner. It is almost always decorated by cutting, in which the top layer or layers are cut away to expose the color or colors beneath, or with engraving, in which the color usually makes a background for the engraving, which is executed through the top layers and into the bottom colorless layer. Rarely, the color is on the inside, rather than the outside, of the object. These objects can be cut, but since the inside color always shows, they do not appear to be cased, but rather solid colored glass.

The technical skills involved in making cased glass were considerable. The colors had to be mixed so that they would all cool at the same rate and there would be no spontaneous cracking when one layer shrank faster than another. The layers had to be blown evenly to avoid thick spots or concealed air bubbles that would be revealed during the cutting.

There is no list of objects shown by the New England Glass Company at the Boston exhibition in 1847, but it may have included the splendidly decorated four-layer vase blown by William Leighton that is shown in Plates I and Ia. As William Leighton Jr. described it to Thomas Garfield in 1879,

I have a colored vase made many years ago at the "New England" which I believe could not be reproduced in this country. It is of four casings - the inner of flint glass - then red, then opake white, then opake green. It is cut to represent a lilly - there is the green bulb, the white leaves, red centre, then a clear flint portion, and rising above all a red top. It is also elaborately gilded though I doubt if the gilding adds much if anything to the beauty. It is about two feet high, and cost the "New England" between $150 and $200. I think it is the most remarkable and beautiful vase in the country.

The most difficult portion of the manufacture of my vase was blowing the casings perfectly even; this was done by my father; and I do not believe there is another man in this country that can do such a piece of work.(7)