Dreaming of a Brite Christmas

 

QUESTION: For several years I’ve been searching for older ornaments for my Christmas tree. I’ve seen a good number at flea markets and antique cooperatives. Many of these are still in their original boxes marked “Shiny Brite.” I’d like to know more about this company. When did they produce ornaments and what kind did they produce?

ANSWER: Today, the trend is to decorate Christmas trees with handcrafted ornaments, from simpler ones sold at church bazar to finely crafted ones of wood, silver, and gold sold at Christmas markets throughout the world. But some people prefer to decorate their trees with nostalgic glass ornaments from their childhood.

Ornaments that decorated yesterday’s trees continue to create holiday traditions. Shiny glass orbs hang from branches in bright, shiny colors, and sparkly patterns. Shiny Brite was a mid-20th-century brand created by German-American immigrant Max Eckardt.

Blown-glass Christmas ornaments with hand-painted accents got their start in the German village of Lauscha in the 1840s. Glassmakers blew molten glass into molds shaped like fruit and nuts, then silvered the inside with a special compound of silver nitrate and sugar water. 

As a native of a small village near Lauscha, Eckhardt knew the appeal of glass ornaments and also saw their potential in the American market. He had been importing hand-blown glass balls from his homeland since the early 20th century. He had the foresight to anticipate a disruption in his supply of glass from Germany from the upcoming World War II and in 1937, he established the Shiny Brite Company in New York.  The silver nitrate coating on the insides of his ornaments inspired him to name his company Shiny Brite.

To keep his company afloat, Eckhardt sought the help of New York’s Corning Glass Company, with the promise that F.W. Woolworth would place a large order if Corning could modify its glass ribbon machine, which made light bulbs, to produce ornaments. This machine, built in 1926, produced 2,000 light bulbs per minute. The transition was a success, and Woolworth’s ordered more than 235,000 ornaments. In December 1939,Eckhardt shipped the first machine-made batch to its 5-and-10-Cent Stores, where they sold for 2 to 10 cents each.

By 1940, Corning was producing 300,000 unadorned ornaments per day, sending the clear glass balls to outside artists, including those at Eckardt’s factories, to be hand decorated. After being lined with silver nitrate, the ornaments ran through a lacquer bath, received decoration from Eckardt’s employees and packaging in brown cardboard boxes. According to a LIFE magazine article from December 1940, Corning Glass Works expected to produce 40 million ornaments by the end of that year, supplying 100 percent of the domestic ornament market.

Originally, the ornaments were plain silver, but eventually Eckardt produced them in a large variety of colors: with classic red the most popular color in the 1940s, followed by green, gold, pink and blue, both in solids and stripes. The company also offered Shiny Brite ornaments in a variety of shapes besides balls, including tops, bells, icicles, teardrops, trees, finials, pine cones, and Japanese lanterns, and reflectors. Workers decorated some with mica “snow.”

Through the 1940s and 1950s, Shiny Brite ornaments became the most popular tree ornaments in the U.S. Eckhardt stressed that they were American-made as a selling point during World War II by featuring Uncle Sam shaking hands with Santa on the front of the original 1940's boxes.

Corning continued to crank out Shiny Brite ornaments, and by the 1950s, production reached a rate of 1,000 per minute; with machines also painting them at that time. The 1950s was the peak of Shiny Brite production and popularity, with Eckardt operating four New Jersey factories to keep pace with the demand.

Shiny Brite ornaments dangled from trees through the early 1960s, until plastic ornaments became more popular. But over the years, vintage Shiny Brites have remained popular with collectors for their beauty and nostalgia, and acting as a sort of time capsule of American holiday history. They are some of the most sought after vintage ornaments from the mid 20th century and are the perfect decoration for those Space-Age aluminum trees.

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Buttering Up!

 

QUESTION: I first became introduced to little butter dishes, known as butter pats, while browsing tables at a local flea market. Most of the time, dealers place these in glass cases and unless antiquers look carefully, they can easily be missed. 

ANSWER: In the United States and many parts of Europe, wealthy people who had elaborate dinnerware sets for formal dining used butter pat plates primarily in the 1800s and into the early 1900. Each dinner guest was given his or her own butter pat plate on which to put a pat, or lump, of butter.

Butter pats, manufactured in a variety of designs and shapes by the finest porcelain manufacturies, first appeared in the 1850s and reached the height of popularity between 1880 and 1910, though some restaurants and railroads still used them into the 1950s and 1960s. Although also known as butter chips, butters, butter pat plates, or individual butters, they’re commonly referred to as butter pats.

And no proper Victorian table could be set without them. The Victorians loved excess and nowhere was this more evident than in their table settings. During this age of elegance, each kind of food had its own piece of china or silver, and butter wasn’t any different.

Victorians folded a serving a bread, often consumed without butter, hidden in the folds of a napkin at each place setting. If a meal course required bread to be buttered, servants placed individual miniature plates above and slightly to the left of center of the service plates. 

However, butter during the Victorian Age wasn’t commercially processed but made at home. Victorian ladies or their servants labored hard, creating butter in a wooden or stone churn, shaping it with a paddle and squeezing it to remove excess moisture. They then placed the newly churned butter into a mold or shaped it into a mound with wooden paddles. 

The molds typically held a pound of butter. Either the lady of the house or her servants cut the butter into smaller pieces  to serve for special dinners. Sometimes, they shaped the small pats of butter into unusual forms, such as rosettes. Very wealthy families often used decorative individual hand-carved butter stamps featuring the family crest or a special design. 

Made for holding an individual servings of butter, the butter pat reached its zenith during the Victorian era when ornate elegance dictated that every place setting at the dining table consist of several dishes for different foods. As a necessary part of a complete set of fine china, dinnerware manufacturers crafted butter pats with the same attention to detail, and by the turn of the 20th century, they produced them in an array of designs, patterns, and shapes—round, fan-shaped, shell-shaped, as well as the more common square. They often decorated with fish, fowl, and floral motifs, making them into miniature works of art.

Eventually, the extravagance of the Victorian Era gave way to more informal dining. This created a need for durable and practical everyday dishware. Potteries needed to destroy outdated molds and streamline production. This included butter pats, no longer required on the informal dinner table.

Butter itself was often molded or stamped to form patterns, such as flowers, on the butter’s surface. Each individual lump of butter was then placed on a butter pat plate belonging to a specific guest.

Butter pat plates produced in the 1800s and early 1900s were primarily made out of either porcelain or sterling silver, and some made of glass. They were produced as part of dinner service sets or to match existing dinner service sets. Each tiny plate was typically less than three inches square and held either one or two pats of butter at a time.

The colors and designs on the butter pat plates also got more elaborate as time went on. Floral designs were quite common. In some cases, the manufacturers shaped and colored the butter pats to resemble flowers. Square or round ones featured pictures of flowers in their centers or floral patterns around their edges. Other popular butter pat themes included animals and birds.

Butter pat patterns also changed as advertising methods evolved. Some later butter pats had pictures and slogans on them, advertising businesses, events, or advancements of some kind.

Many of the most popular butter pat producers were the “big name” porcelain producers which were historically popular for their dinnerware and decorative pieces. Haviland, Majolica, and Waverly were the most popular. Of Haviland’s up to 60,000 different patterns, most included butter pats as part of a place setting. However, there were many companies which each produced anywhere from a few to dozens of patterns made from many different materials.

Although butter pat manufacturers mass-produced them, some were more unusual. For example, several French and German butter pat manufacturers produced butter pats in the 1800s that artists hand-painted later with elaborate designs and patterns. Some of them even featured hand-painted portraits of people.

With the advent of the modern lifestyles of the 20th century. Butter pats, along with many other forms of formal Victorian dinnerware, lost their appeal. Bread and butter plates, averaging 6 inches in diameter, eventually replaced the butter pat.

Though Wedgwood and Royal Doulton still produce butter pats, they only do so for luxury hotels and First Class airline service. 

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Going to the Dogs

 

QUESTION: I bought these little white match holders from an antiques dealer in northern France, just across from Dover, England, so it’s quite possible they’re English. I’d like to find out their origin and date if possible. I have a collection of match holders but have never seen any like these before.

ANSWER: These match holders are quite unique and seem to be made of Parian, a type of biscuit porcelain imitating marble that was made in England and the United States in the 19th century. Designed to imitate carved marble, it had the advantage that it could be prepared in a liquid form and cast in a mold, enabling mass production.

Parian became popular with middle and upper middle class Victorian women who desired to own the marble statuary and china of the upper classes but couldn’t afford them. Parian filled this need at an affordable price. And while people normally associate Parian with grander sculptural forms and statues and items like water pitchers here in the U.S., it seems that as it’s popularity began to wane that some companies began making smaller less expensive items such as match holders. 

Because Parian had a higher proportion of feldspar than porcelain, makers fired it at a lower temperature. The increased amount of feldspar caused the finished body to be more highly vitrified, thus possessing an ivory color and having a marble-like texture that’s smoother than that of biscuit, or unglazed, porcelain. In its Victorian heyday, potteries produced hundreds of thousands of pieces of Parian ware annually. 

Though the Great London Exhibition of 1851 gave Thomas Battam credit for inventing Parian, indicating that he succeeded in producing a very perfect imitation of marble, there seemed to be controversy about who actually invented it.  While Battam may have invented it, several English factories claimed credit for its development. But the Staffordshire firm operated by William Taylor Copeland and Thomas Garrett was the first to produce and sell it in 1842, and went on to become one of its major manufacturers.

Several potteries marketed it under different names. The Copeland firm called it "statuary porcelain" because of its resemblance to the fine white marble of neoclassical sculpture. Wedgwood named it "Carrara," after the Italian quarry patronized by Michelangelo. But it was Minton which coined the word "Parian" to suggest Paros, the Greek isle that furnished much of the stone used in the classical period. Thus, it quickly became the medium's generic name.

Ultimately, potteries produced two varieties of Parian ware—Statuary Parian, used in the making of figures and reproductions of sculpture, and Standard Parian, from which they made hollowware. 

Standard Parian, with a greater proportion of feldspar in the composition but no frit, was hard porcelain. The presence of iron in the feldspar without iron silicate caused early Parian statuary to appear ivory tinted. Both English and American potters either obtained details of the original formula or worked out their own, resulting in enormous production of Parian wares on both sides of the Atlantic. Plus the invention in 1844 of a patented machine that allowed scaled reproductions of larger bronze or marble originals made replicas of figures and busts by noted sculptors widely available.

Though Minton produced several small Parian statues of dogs, it seems far more likely that Copeland-Spode produced these dog match holders since they produced a wider array of Parian ware, including match holders. They probably date from the 1890s. As time went on, Parian ware went from a less expensive substitute for marble in statuary to the material for inexpensive knickknacks.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "The Ancients" in the 2021 Spring Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.