QUESTION: I recently purchased a piece of what was described as “Bristol Blue” glass through an online antiques auction. I collect antique glass but this vase struck me as something unique. Although it looked like Victorian enameled glass, it resembled porcelain and the description said it was made in England in the late 18th century. I would really like to know more about this piece. I didn’t think glassmakers produced enameled glass that early Was it produced in Bristol, England, and thus the name, and who made it? And just how far back does Bristol Blue glass go?
ANSWER: Those are all very good questions. Let’s begin with the name. Even though this type of glass has Bristol in its name, glassmakers throughout most of England produced it. The blue in the name refers to the coloring used in the glass.
In the first half of the 18th century, near Redcliffel Backs, Temple Meads, Bedminster and other suburbs of Bristol, England, the squat chimneys of glasshouses and potteries silhouetted the landscape like giant beehives. But it was the age of porcelain, and anyone who could afford to buy it did so. Porcelain factories enjoyed the protection of kings, and European elite emptied their purses for priceless porcelain treasures. The arrival of an affordable substitute in decorated rnilch glass from Germany delighted Bristol glassmakers. For the first time, they had a perfect porcelain substitute within their reach.
The Venetians first made glass as an imitation of porcelain prior to 1500. Experts believe they used tin oxide as the agent to produce the white opacity in their glass. Eighteenth-century English white glass, called enamel glass in advertisements of the 1760s, was an intensely white, brittle material, generally a potash-lead mix, rendered opaque by the addition of lead arsenate. The porcelain-like, opaque glass produced by the glassmakers of Bristol, was soft and smooth to the touch yet retained the fine heaviness of English crystal. It was an instant success, forcing the Bristol glassmen to borrow decorators from neigh-boring potteries to keep up with the public's demand.
England's glass excise tax of 1746 raised the duty on clear glass but didn’t tax opaque and colored glass because there was so little of it being made. This offered an excellent economic incentive for its increased production.
Chemists long knew that a powdered coloring could be premixed and supplied to glassmakers for addition to clear glass of their own making. But it was 18th-century German chemists from Saxony, who refined impure oxide of cobalt to produce a blue powder of unparalleled purity and uniform consistency. They exported their product, called “smalt,” to England, where a British merchant distributed it under the name "Bristol Blue."
The Bristol glassmakers quickly added the new deep-blue color to their already successful line of opaque white glass. Vigor & Stevens, of Thomas Street and Lazarus Jacobs, and later his son Isaac, of Temple Street, produced pieces primarily in deep Bristol Blue.
By the end of the 18th century the manufacture of blue glass became fairly common throughout England and continued to be marketed under the name of Bristol Blue. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to identify glass made in Bristol from a piece manufactured elsewhere. The original term “Bristol Blue" referred simply to the coloring agent sold to glassmakers rather than to their finished products.
The early shapes, manufactured around 1770, emulated Chinese and English porcelain—pear-shaped covered vases, trumpet-mouthed beakers, and cruets—all produced in sets. Glassmakers also produced scent or smelling bottles and snuff boxes, often facet-cut, with enameling and gilding, in both white and blue glass.
Early Chinese porcelain painters greatly influenced the 18th-century Bristol designs. The Chinese artists working at the Imperial Porcelain Factory excelled in delicate miniature enameled decoration on their opaque white glass. They often employed motifs of figures, birds, and European flowers much admired by the Emperor Chi’en Lung, who ruled from 1736 to 1795. Since most English glasshouses made their opaque white glass in competition with porcelain, most used the same styles and even the same artists to decorate both.
Glass decorator Michael Edkins linked the white and blue glass under the mutual name of "Bristol." At first, he apprenticed to an enameling firm in Birmingham, England, but at the age of 20, he took up residence in Bristol and settled down to decorate pottery dishes and tiles. At that time, artists painted the pieces with pencils made of bristles from the noses and eyelids of oxen. Graduating to glass, Edkins began decorating "enamel and blue glassware." He worked both independently and for Isaac Jacobs, Little & Longman, and Williams, Dunbar & Company from 1782 onwards. Instead of using enamel paints that needed to be fired, Edkins used standard oil colors, or plain gold gilt motifs, applied with unfired varnish, which he called "cold" decoration.
Generally, artists decorated Bristol Blue ware with unfired or lightly fired gold varnish. Cruets and decanters often sported the name of their contents as well as intricate garlands and wreaths of plain gold.
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