American Pressed Flint Glass Compote, Attributed to Boston & Sandwich Circa 1850–1870

Details

Description

American Pressed Flint Glass Compote, Attributed to Boston & Sandwich
Circa 1850–1870

This is one of those pieces of early … Read more American Pressed Flint Glass Compote, Attributed to Boston & Sandwich
Circa 1850–1870

This is one of those pieces of early American glass that looks like a flower and works like a bowl. The deep bowl is molded in twelve tall petals that rise to a rim rippling up into rounded lobes and dipping to a point between them, so the silhouette moves the whole way around. A band of smaller loops runs around the lower body, and the base of the bowl is set with a ring of little oval thumbprints. It sits on a paneled hollow stem and a fluted foot, and the metal is proper old flint glass — heavy in the hand, bright, with a faint gray cast and a scatter of tiny seed bubbles that only early glass has.

At just over nine inches across and seven high it is the right scale for a dining table without taking the whole thing over, and it is just as good on a kitchen island, a console or a bathroom counter. Pile it with clementines, figs or walnuts, use it for bread rolls, keep soap and a folded towel in it, or leave it empty on a sideboard where the lobed rim can throw light around. It sits happily with silver, with plain white china and with modern ceramics, and it is an easy way to bring something genuinely nineteenth-century into a room without any period fuss.

Like nearly all American pressed tableware of this date it carries no factory mark, and it is offered as attributed to the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company on the evidence of its form, its metal and its molded pattern, which is the design known in the trade as Petal and Loop.

Dimensions
Height: 7 inches (17.8 cm)
Diameter: 9 ¼ inches (23.5 cm)

Condition
Excellent condition, the glass retaining its original clarity.

(Ref: NY9992-irr) See less