At Bristol, Nailsea, Wrockwardine, and perhaps at Norwich, glassware of various colours was made. There are collectors who care for nothing else but coloured glass; there are collectors who only care for coloured glass paper-weights; there are collectors who will not buy coloured glass at all.

“BRISTOL”

Bristol coloured glass is the most sought for. There are several varieties. The rarest is the opaque, whitish glass which rather resembles porcelain or Battersea enamel in general tint, and is painted upon as if it were porcelain or enamel: held to a good light this ware is seen to be rather opalescent, and might be dubbed opal glass. Edkins, a painter of Bristol delft, used delft-like colours and designs on this opal glass; wreaths of flowers (the rose and the fuchsia in particular) and flourishes in the Louis XV style are characteristic. Cups and saucers, teapots, tumblers, bowls and jugs, cruet vessels, and candlesticks of this ware exist, though few; the last-named imitated Battersea enamel candlesticks in shape and decoration. A characteristic of this glass is ridges or waves on the surface, detected by the finger. The earliest examples have domed and folded feet.

Less rare, but rare, are the wine glasses with red and white or blue and white spirals in the stems which were made at Bristol; if the white is not cotton-white but greyish, however, such a glass is probably old Dutch.

Fine tableware of transparent blue, blue-green, red, and purple was made at Bristol; the blue is a peculiar, unique blue, imitated but never well reproduced; where the glass is thick, it, held to the light, shows a Royal purple, and where thin it is almost a sea-blue. Egg-cups of this ware are handsome. Bristol red glass is of a ruby hue, with not so much vermilion in it as in Bohemian glass: there is also “cherry-red” glass. Bristol blue and red glass was sometimes touched with gilt, in lettering and lines; this did not wear well except when embossed.

Bristol produced the finest glass paper-weights—of a size and shape to fill the palm of one’s hand if only the wrist and finger-tips are touching the paper—and at the base of these you see flowers of coloured glass, bright and various in hue, and rendered with wonderful skill; of the same kind of mosaic or tessellated glass is a small pepper pot in my possession, a very rare example. Other Bristol paper-weights, larger, and door-stops, still larger and heavier, were tall ovals, two or three or four times the size of a goose’s egg and rather resembling one in shape; the colour is a verdant or a sage green, and the inner decoration is flower-petals and leaves, pearled over as if by dew, and blown with extraordinary skill.

Collectors should beware of forgeries of parti-coloured paper-weights. They may be known by the coarseness of the flowers inside the glass, the lack of fine workmanship, and the tawdriness of the colours.

“BRISTOL” AND “NAILSEA”

Nailsea is a small place near Bristol, and nobody can now be sure from which of the two came any particular bauble—coloured glass-flask, pestle, bell, witch-ball, tobacco pipe, trumpet, jug, rolling-pin, bellows-shaped article, walking-stick or rapier, or the (excessively rare) long glass cylinders containing coloured glass counters for games. But it is thought that the Bristol wares of this kind were brighter in colour than the Nailsea product, which, because less skilful and daring, perhaps, was cooler in tint, less striking in mixture of colours, and therefore more refined. Probably Bristol produced the glass which is ornamented by alternate broad stripes of red and opal-white. Perhaps Nailsea was responsible for glass of a “greenery-yallery” hue containing whitish spots or splashes: there are many forgeries of jugs and rolling-pins, in this style, about.

“WROCKWARDINE”

At Wrockwardine, in Salop, the glass works turned out coloured walking-sticks, ewers, scent-bottles, flasks, twin bottles for oil and vinegar, and toys; the characteristic being that the glass is striped, in white and one or more colours.

“SUNDERLAND”

The Sunderland glassworks are supposed to have made rolling-pins, and almost certainly produced the curious polygonal salt cellars (which some people have thought to be insulators for piano-feet), that reflect colour and gilding or coloured heads of men or women, from their bases, talc keeping the ornament there in place.

MISCELLANEA

Witch-balls seem to have been made at Bristol, for I own one of the Bristol red and opal-white; at Nailsea (in inferior, watery blue); and at Wrockwardine (greenish-blue striped with pale white). These balls, it is said, were hung at each door and window, “to keep the witches out” (see illustration, page 8).

Glass articles splashed with colour outside, on the exterior of the article, exist, but in great rarity; the splashed-on colours are glass-oxides, but look like oil-paint; the greenish clear glass beneath the splashing resembles the Nailsea product.

GREEN, PURPLE, AND YELLOW WINE GLASSES

Fine wine glasses, for hock or other white wines, were made in olive-green, grass-green, purple, and orange; these are collected by some people for use at table, by some for the collector’s cabinet. The older ones show the characteristics of dimensions and shape which will be described later in this book.