Glass

by Edward Dillon

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. ... CHAPTER XXII CONTEMPORARY GLASS HE history of glass in the nineteenth century is mainly concerned with improvements in me chanical processes, by means of which it is now possible to turn out a perfectly clear white glass in large quantities at greatly reduced cost. Meantime little heed has been given to the artistic merit of individual pieces. In fact, thanks in no small measure to one widely applied mechanical 'improvement,' the process namely of pressing into a mould, the highly trained skill of the glass-blower has been less and less called into play, so that now a complaint is heard, both in England and in France, of the difficulty of finding workmen thoroughly masters of the art. The last stage, indeed, in the decline of our English cut-glass was reached when 'passable imitations' of the facetted work were turned out by this 'pressing' process. And yet from time to time attempts have been made on the one hand to give fresh life to old methods of work and schemes of decoration, on the other to develop the application of the material along new or previously little explored paths. Of what has been effected in Venice in the first of these directions something has already been said. In England, and we may add in Germany also (at Berlin, for instance, and at Ehrenfeld, near Cologne), these attempts have for the most part taken the direction of revivals, as when by the skilful use of the blowingiron table-glass has been produced of graceful but rather fantastic outlines and with more or less reminiscence of Venetian prototypes. I need not dwell upon such efforts, as nothing in the way of a school has been founded. It is indeed noticeable that both in Germany and in England, in the case of the more expensive table-glass that we now see in...

359 pages, Paperback

First published September 12, 2013