Material – Glass

Place of Origin – unknown

Before 1675 most of the table glass in England was imported from Europe. Venetian soda glass dominated the European glass market, characterized by thin, delicate, ornate vessels. Table glass was an expensive imported ware that was not readily accessible to the middle class. Cheaper and more durable drinking vessels were used in taverns – like salt glazed stoneware, pewter, or horn vessels.[i]

Venetian glassmakers were producing large quantities of opaque white glass in the 15th century.[ii] In the 16th century, they were producing white glass vessels as imitations of the Chinese porcelains.[iii] By the 16th century the English were also making colored glass, including opaque white.[iv] Opaque white glass gained popularity in the 1670s and glassmakers from multiple countries were making it.[v] Fragments of opaque white table glass have been recovered from c.1670-1690s buildings on a private town lot in the Charles Towne settlement.

Starting in the 16th century English glassworks produced Venetian-style table glass. English vessel forms tended to be less ornate and less durable than traditional Venetian vessels. In 1570, Jean Carre, a glassmaker from Arras and Antwerp, was granted the right to establish a glassworks in England that made Venetian style vessels. Carre’s glassworks was supervised by Jacob Verzelini and employed several glassmen from Murano, and is attributed as the first English producer of Venetian glass. When Carre died in 1572, Verzelini took over the glassworks and was granted a 21-year monopoly of the production of Venetian-style glass in England provided that his wares were cheaper than the imported Italian glass and he train English workers. During the Commonwealth we see a drastic decrease in the production of table glass in England.[vi] The 1612 ban on the use of wood to heat glass furnaces posed a technological challenge for glassmakers as the dust from coal caused impurities in their glass wares.[vii] Following the Restoration of Charles II, trade restrictions were lowered which made it profitable for merchants to import Venetian glass.[viii]

The Restoration also led to a revitalization of the English glassworks. The revived attention to scientific and technological innovation led to a resurgence of the quest to make refined, translucent glass wares.[ix] Charles II and the Royal Society’s involvement in the Scientific Revolution pushed for advancements in glass manufacture needed to create the scientific instruments used in their experiments and research. Robert Boyle’s air pump experiments were constrained and limited by technological limits in glassblowing and what glass manufacturers were able to produce. The scientific experimentations of the Royal Society led to the quest for improved stronger, bubble-free glass that was able to withstand pressure, was resistant to cracking, and could be fashioned into larger apparatus’. Scientific observation also played an important role in scientific experiments in glass innovation as it led to the search for clearer glass that would make it easier to make observations during scientific experiments.[x]

With the assistance of scientists, including Robert Boyle, the Worshipful Company of Glass-sellers, located in London, experimented with improvements to create the highest quality clear glass that had a high refractive index. Between 1674 and 1676 George Ravenscroft, an analytical chemist, invented a method to produce a brilliant clear table glass by reducing the salts and increasing the lead oxide content. This new innovation allowed English glass makers to create a successful and desirable product for the European markets that’s quality surpassed Venetian glass, which had a straw-colored tint. Leaded glass has a lower melting temperature, which helped lessen the risk of impurities from the coal dust. Ravenscroft’s glass also had the advantageous qualities of being soft and malleable, having a high shine, and heavier than Venetian glass. Ravenscroft’s new clear leaded table glass allowed the English to gain control of the table glass market throughout the Georgian era. This improved high-quality clear glass also played an important role in the scientific innovations and experiments that changed the ways humans perceived the world around them and their significance within it.[xi]

The English preferred simpler less ornate designs. Table glass was sold by weight, and thus they pushed heavier wares that became fashionable. During the seventeenth century drinking glasses often have a conical-shaped bowl, thick stems with heavy knops, or collars. The stems were sometime decorated with prunts, a tooled glass seal, on the stem. Before 1730, the base, or foot, of drinking glasses tend to have a folded edge to help provide additional strength against chipping. Table glass was hand blown and the rough pontil scar would be located on the center of the foot, thus the foot was usually slightly conical which raised the center of the foot so that it would not scratch the table.[xii]

Fragments of clear table glass have been recovered from c.1670-1690s buildings on a private town lot in the Charles Towne settlement. Many of these are too fragmentary to conclusively identify their vessel form. We have thin, clear, table glass lips for hollow ware vessels. A few fragments of stem ware have been identified. One is a heavy vessel with a thick bowl and stem, the top of the stem has a flattened knop, or collar, just below the bowl.

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[i] L.M. Bickerton, English Drinking Glasses 1675-1825 (Shire Publications, Ltd., Oxford, UK, 1984), 2-5. The Corning Museum of Glass, Glass From the Corning Museum of Glass: A Guide to the Collections (The Corning Museum of Glass, New York, NY, 1974), 41-43; Derek C. Davis, English Bottles & Decanters 1650-1900 (Charles Letts and Company Limited, London, UK, 1972), 11; Olga Drahotova, European Glass: The development of hollow glassware through the ages (Excalibur Books, New York, NY, 1983), 33-40; G. Bernard Hughes, English, Scottish and Irish Table Glass: From the Sixteenth Century to 1820 (Bramhall House, New York, NY, 1956), 27; The Toledo Museum of Art, Art in Glass: a guide to the class collections (Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, 1969), 45,57.

[ii] Geoff Egan, “Medieval Opaque White Glass from London”, Journal of Glass Studies 40(1998):182-185; The Toledo Museum of Art, “Art in Glass”, 45.

[iii] Drahotova, “European Glass”, 34; Egan, “Medieval Opaque White”, 182.

[iv] Noel Hume, “A Guide to Artifacts”, 196.

[v] Drahotova, “European Glass”, 153.

[vi] Davis, ”English Bottles”, 11-12; Drahotova, “European Glass”, 66; Hughes, “English, Scottish, and Irish”, 28-29,32; The Toledo Museum of Art, “Art in Glass”, 46.

[vii] Davis, ”English Bottles”, 12; Drahotova, “European Glass”, 100-102.

[viii] Hughes, “English, Scottish, and Irish”, 37.

[ix] Hughes, “English, Scottish, and Irish”, 37.

[x] Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press, Oxford, UK, 1985), 27-29; David Wootten, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Harper Perennial, New York, NY, 2015), 313, 560-561.

[xi] Bickerton, “English Drinking Glasses”, 5; The Corning Museum of Glass, “Glass From the Corning Museum”, 69; Davis, ”English Bottles”, 13; Drahotova, “European Glass”, 9; Hughes, “English, Scottish, and Irish”, 37-38,41-43,47; David Dungworth and Colin Brain, “Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century English Lead Glass” In Modern Methods for Analyzing Archaeological and Historical Glass (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2013), 573-574; Ivor Noel Hume, A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America (Vintage Books, New York, NY 1991), 186; Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1996), 144-148; The Toledo Museum of Art, “Art in Glass”, 57-58; Wootten, “The Invention of Science”, 245, 560.

[xii] Bickerton, “English Drinking Glasses”, 2-8; The Corning Museum of Glass, “Glass From the Corning Museum”, 69; Dungworth and Brain, “Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century”, 574-577; Hughes, “English, Scottish, and Irish”, 45,387; Noel Hume, “A Guide to Artifacts”, 187,189.