Beauty Is in the Eyes of the Beholder

QUESTION: Recently, I purchased a pressed glass plate that seems to be painted red and gold on one side. The paint is in pretty good condition, although some of it has flaked off. Did someone purposely paint this plate. I don’t want to scrape off the remaining paint until I know for sure. What can you tell me about this plate? And was the paint applied at the time of its manufacture?

ANSWER: As the old saying goes, “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.” You bought the plate because you liked it, but the paint on it does make it look like someone was doing a bit of their own decorating. Fortunately for you, you asked about it before scraping away the paint. Your plate is what’s known as “Goofus” Glass. Sounds goofy, doesn’t it. In fact, some people call it tacky, some call it ordinary, and, yes, some call it beautiful.

Manufacturers didn’t originally call it "Goofus" glass. They had no designation of Goofus glass in their  salesmen's catalogs. They didn’t even recognize it as a specific classification of glass. Goofus glass, at its inception, was just a variety of pressed glass.

The term "Goofus" refers more to the use of unfired “cold” painted decoration to a piece of pressed glass, rather than to the glass itself. Many people believe the first users of Goofus noticed how easily the painted decoration on this glass wore away and felt that it was "goofy" or that someone had tried to "goof us."

Pressed, or pattern glass was, by the end of the 19th century, a substitute cut glass by the middle class. So the demand for pressed glass rose tremendously. To keep up with the demand, a number of new factories appeared, mostly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana due to the availability of natural gas to fire their furnaces. The most prominent of these was the Northwood Glass Company, founded in 1887 in Martin's Ferry, Ohio.

One of Northwood’s original owners, Harry Northwood, later founded his own company, H. Northwood and Company in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1901. Within five years, his company had developed a reputation as America's finest glassware manufacturer.

Always innovative, Harry Northwood was probably the first to make what has come to be known as Goofus glass and, a few years later in 1908, Carnival glass.

Other companies, such as The Imperial Glass Co. of Bellaire, Ohio, focused immediately on Goofus glass. Soon others joined them, including the Crescent Glass Co. of Wellsburg, West Virginia, Lancaster Glass Company in Lancaster, Ohio, Westmoreland Glass of Grapeville, Pennsylvania, Dugan Glass Company. of Indiana, Pennsylvania,; McKee Glass Company of Jeannette, Pennsylvania, and Indiana Glass Company of Dunkirk, Indiana, which produced more Goofus glass than any other manufacturer.

Somewhere along the line, the idea to paint pressed glassware with bright colors— usually red, but sometimes green, pink, brown, orange, silver, and always some gold—gained popularity with the buying public, who scooped it up in large quantities. This popularity glass peaked between 1908 and 1918.

Manufacturers marketed Goofus glass with names evoking faraway exotic places and   wealth. Some of these included Egyptian Intaglio, Egyptian Art, Khedive (meaning "viceroys of Egypt"), Golden Oriental, Artistic Decorated, and Intaglio Art.

Because it was mass-produced and relatively cheap, retail shop owners bought it to give as a premium for buying their goods. Goofus glass was given away by every sort of business—furniture stores, car dealers, even at WW1 Bond drives. A person could buy a house and get a complete set of dishes. Or buy a new suit and get an intaglio fruit bowl. Or buy an engagement ring and get a vase or a set of dishes. Fair owners even awarded it as prizes for winning games. It was the first Carnival glass, preceding the iridized glass known as Carnival glass today.

Glass companies produced plates, bowls, vases, oil lamps, dresser sets, salt and pepper shakers and candle holders. Many of the Goofus patterns feature flowers and fruit, especially grapes, among other motifs, raised out of the surrounding glass as seen in vases, powder boxes and lamps. The pattern could also be pressed into the glass from beneath the surface providing an intaglio effect as found in Goofus plates, baskets and candy dishes.

Because of the extensive use of red, green, and gold paint, Goofus glass became known as “Mexican ware” because the colors reminded buyers of the colors in the Mexican flag.

Workers decorated the glass in one of two ways: They either covered one side or the other of the piece completely with paint, known as “All Over Decoration” or “AOD,” or they painted just the distinguishing pattern on the glass, leaving the remainder of the glass  untouched, known as "Pattern Decorated" or "PD." The more frequently seen surface textures are various "basket weave,” "fish net," and "stippled."  

By the beginning of the Great Depression, Goofus glass production had come to an end.

It’s difficult to find a piece of Goofus glass in perfect condition whether the paint was applied to the outside or the inside of a piece. The worn paint became so unsightly it was washed away by the original or subsequent owners.

Collectors pay more to own pieces made for special occasions or to commemorate a World’s Fair or another event than other nondescript pieces. They also look for complete sets such as a large berry bowl with matching smaller bowls. Goofus collectors seek out rare oil lamps complete with glass shade and matching base. Of course, Goofus glass in all shapes and forms in great condition with very little paint wear will bring a much better price than a piece with considerable paint loss.

Portrait of a Songbird

QUESTION:  I have this bust of a woman and was wondering if you can tell me anything about it. It's approximately ten inches high and appears to be made of marble. The name “Patti” appears under the bust.

ANSWER: Your bust isn’t made of marble but is a fine example of Parian Ware, a bisque-type porcelain invented to simulate marble so that upper middle class 19th-century homeowners could decorate their homes with beautiful things much like the wealthy.  The woman depicted in this late 19th-century bust is the renowned opera singer Adelina Patti.

First, let’s take a look at the bust’s material. Unlike marble, which is a stone, Parian is actually a form of ceramics made of white clay and feldspar. Minton, one of England’s leading ceramics makers, named it in 1845 for the Greek island of Paros, renowned for its fine-textured, white marble of the same name. Copeland, another leading ceramics manufacturer, called their version Statuary Porcelian. Parian’s advantage over marble was that it could be prepared as a liquid and poured into molds, cutting production costs and making it cheaper to buy.

Used mostly for figurines and busts, Parian at first simulated famous classic sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome. But later on, after it caught on, artists sculpted busts of famous persons of the times. This bust of Adelina Patti is one of hundreds produced during the peak of Parian’s popularity.

Although eight primary English manufacturers produced Parian, Minton and Copeland were the largest and produced some of the finest examples.

Born on February 10, 1843 in Madrid, Spain, the last child of Italian tenor Salvatore Patti and soprano Caterina Barilli, Adelina Juana Maria Patti was a famous 19th-century opera singer. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914. Along with two other songbirds, Jenny Lind and Thérèse Tietjens, Patti remains one of the most famous sopranos in history because of the purity of her lyrical voice. The composer Giuseppe Verdi, writing in 1877, described her as being the finest singer who had ever lived.

She made her operatic debut at age 16 on November 24, 1859 in the title role of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at the Academy of Music in New York. When she was   18, she appeared at London’s Covent Garden Opera House in the role of Amina in Bellini's La sonnambula. She had such success at Covent Garden that she purchased  a house in Clapham and, using London as a base, went on to conquer the famous opera houses of Europe.

In 1862, during an American tour, she sang John Howard Payne's “Home, Sweet Home” at the White House for President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Lincoln. Moved to tears, the Lincolns requested an encore of the song in honor of their dead son Willie. Patti later performed it many times as a encore at the end of her concerts.

Patti had a tremendously successful career. She sang not only in England and the United States, but also in Europe, Russia, and South America, receiving critical acclaim wherever she went.

Patti was a true diva. She demanded to be paid $5000 a night in gold, before the performance. Her contracts stipulated that she receive top billing and that her name be  printed larger than anyone else in the cast.

She last sang in public in October 1914, taking part in a Red Cross concert at London's Royal Albert Hall that had been organized to aid victims of World War I. She lived long enough to see the war end, dying on September 27, 1919 of natural causes at Craig-y-Nos Castle, her private residence in Wales. In her will, she requested that she be buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to be close to her father and favorite composer Rossini.

When she was a child, her parents moved the family to New York City where Patti grew up in the Wakefield section of the Bronx. Patti sang professionally from childhood, and developed into a coloratura soprano with perfectly equalized vocal registers and a surprisingly warm, satiny tone. Patti learned how to sing and gained understanding of voice technique from her brother-in-law Maurice Strakosch, who was a musician and impresario.

For more information on Parian Ware, read my article in The Antiques Almanac.

Biscuit Tins Never Get Stale

QUESTION: I’ve inherited my mother’s collection of English biscuit tins. She had been collecting them since she made a trip to England at the end of the 1960s. Her collection includes over four dozen tins, some are fancier than others. I love these old tins and want to continue collecting them. When my mother began collecting, she had to buy them during several trips to England. But today, I figure I can purchase them online. Can you tell me more about their history? Also, do you think I can add to her collection?

ANSWER: Biscuit tins are a fascinating part of British cultural history. They’re even tied to the monarchy. And while today manufacturers don’t make them as fancy as some of the ones from the early part of the 20th century, they’re still very popular with collectors. The peak of biscuit tin production ran from the late 1890s to the 1930s. Though originally meant to hold biscuits—the British term for “cookies”—they eventually became collectible works of art in themselves.

The history of the biscuit tin began with the passing of the Licensed Grocer’s Act of 1861 which allowed groceries to be individually packaged and sold. This coincided with the removal of the duty on paper for printed labels, so printing directly on to tinplate became common.

The bakery of Huntley & Palmers pioneered the use of metal tins. In 1832, Joseph Huntley’s son, who founded Huntley, Boorne & Stevens in an ironmongers opposite the bakery, began handcrafting large square seven- to ten-pound tins with glass inset tops for retailers. Grocery store clerks would measure out the amount of biscuits from these tins and place them in a paper bag for the customer. However, they didn’t stay fresh for very long once the customer returned home.

So Joseph Huntley began creating smaller tins without the glass insets so that customers could purchase their biscuits in a container to keep them fresh which they could take home. The tins were of such excellent quality that people began to reuse them to hold other things. The tins needed decoration but the only way to do that at the time was to paint them by hand.

In the early 1860s, all that changed with the invention of direct tin printing. This was a complicated and time-consuming technique. Then along came London printer Benjamin George George (That isn’t a typo.), who invented the lithographic transfer method.

In 1868, Huntley & Palmers commissioned the first lithographically decorated tin using George’s method from the London firm of De La Rue. Buckingham Palace granted the bakery permission to supply biscuits to the Royal Family. In order to create an appropriate design befitting the Royal Family, they hired Victorian designer Owen Jones to create a pattern which they could use on the biscuit tins using George’s new method. The result was a richly decorated oblong tin with the Royal Coat of Arms on the lid, now known to collectors as the “Ben George tin.” 

But George’s direct lithographic process, which involved laying an inked stone directly on to a sheet of tin, made it difficult to line up the colors. The breakthrough in decorative tin plate production was the invention of the offset lithographic process in 1877, which consists of bringing a sheet of rubber into contact with the decorated stone, and then setting-off the impression so obtained upon the metal surface. With this method, printers could use any number of colors, position them correctly, and apply the design to an uneven surface if necessary. Thus the elaborately embossed, colorful designs that became a hallmark of late Victorian biscuit tins became technically possible.

It became possible to make tins in almost any shape imaginable. Biscuit lovers bought baskets, windmills, cars, locomotives, globes, tables, and even mailboxes as much for their decorative qualities as their contents. Between 1868 and the outbreak of World War II, Huntley & Palmers issued around 400 tin designs with a lots of variations.

The most exotic designs appeared in the early years of the 20th century, just prior to the First World War. In the 1920s and 1930s, costs had risen substantially and the design of biscuit tins tended to be more conservative, with the exception of those targeted at the Christmas market and intended to appeal to children.

One of the most unique and most popular of biscuit tin designs resembled a stack of books held together with a belt. This 1901 Huntley & Palmers tin, known as “Literature,” was so realistically done that the covers and spines of the books appear to have been deeply tooled and inked and the page edges convincingly marbled and swirled in a rainbow of colors.

Most popular, however, were the tins shaped like vehicles. It was no coincidence that car, train, airplane, and boat tins bore a striking resemblance to similar toys sold at British department and toy stores since toy companies often crafted them from the same molds they used for their products. An example is Carr & Co's double-decker bus tin, made especially for them by Chad Valley and virtually identical to Chad Valley's toy bus except for the internal clockwork mechanism and different advertising.

But Huntley and Palmers were by no means the only company that made unusual biscuit tins. Some of the other famous biscuit tin sellers were Carr & Company., William Crawford & Sons, MacFarlane, Land & Company., and Peek, Frean, and Company. 

During the Second World War, all production on biscuit tins stopped so that factories and materials could be used for the war effort. When the war ended in 1945, production resumed but the tins weren’t as popular as before the war.

Peek, Frean, and Company, McVitie’s, and Jacob’s all became household names but for collectors Huntley & Palmers stands out. Collectors are particularly attracted to the decorative novelty tins. Condition is of prime importance, perhaps even more so with biscuit tins since they rust easily. Many also become worn or dented, giving the novice collector an opportunity to acquire interesting examples relatively cheaply.

Today, biscuit tins range in price from $10 to $200 online. However, the prices of those in British antiques shops are climbing into the stratosphere. This is due mostly to the antiques tourist trade. The most expensive tin sold at auction for over $20,000.

We've Come a Long Way Baby

QUESTION: I discovered an unusual bottle in a box lot I bought at a local house sale.  The bottle is about six or seven inches long, pale green, and oval but doesn’t have a flat bottom, so it must lay on its front or back. Do you have any idea what this little bottle would have contained or been used for?

ANSWER: Believe it or not, your little bottle once held baby’s milk.
           
The development of baby bottles took centuries to transform into the sterile plastic throwaways in use today. As knowledge of germs and hygiene developed, so did the infant feeder. While parents of earlier times sensed that babies who were breast fed had a better chance at surviving, it wasn't until the early 20th century that mothers and bottle makers realized that clean, sterile feeders were necessary to protect a baby's health.

Before then, bottle makers created a variety of feeders—from tiny coffeepot-shaped ones of tin to china submarine-shaped flasks decorated in Flow Blue and transferware patterns. Glass bottles didn’t come on the scene until the mid-19th century.

Nipples, made of wood, ivory, bone, sterling, pewter, leather„ rags, sponge, rubber, and yes, a pickled cow's teat, were nothing like those in use today.

Much like today, bottles were necessary because some mothers couldn’t breast feed, and, unlike today, it wasn’t always fashionable to nurse. When a friend asked Queen Victoria if she intended to breast feed, she reportedly said she had no intention of making  a cow of herself.

One manufacturer immortalized Victoria’s image on a stoneware bottle that’s now prized by collectors. But the queen hated that her likeness appeared on a nursing bottle.

Besides a dislike, of nursing, there were other reasons for women to use baby bottles. Many women thought that nursing would destroy their figures. It also inhibited them socially since they couldn’t travel and leave the baby at home.

Fathers weren’t too keen on breast feeding, either, because doctors and midwives often advised mothers to refrain from sex during nursing.

Wealthier families employed wet nurses, usually young women who had a child and could nurse another. Since parents believed that a milk giver’s personality traits could be transferred to an infant through their milk, choosing the right one was important.

The ideal wet nurse was a plump rosy-cheeked young woman. Many people believed that red-headed girls gave bitter milk and produced ill-tempered babies. They even suspected animal milk, believing that infants took on the attributes of the cow or goat. French nobles gave the title of “contessa” to a wet nurse so that their infants could be nursed by milk of noble origin. Those who couldn’t afford to hire a wet nurse, turned to a variety of infant feeders, many of them unsafe by modern standards.

Though a china submarine-shaped bottle with blue transferware is beautiful, being completely opaque it was hard to clean. Fermenting milk curds could be lodged in the corners and mothers would never see them.

Charles M. Windship of Roxbury, Massachusetts, developed the first glass baby bottle, a small turtle shell-shaped: feeder, in 1841. Women thought the shape would fool their infants into thinking it was a real breast.

To use the Windship bottle, a woman wore it on a harness on her breast. It was probably difficult to use because girls with tender, post-childbirth breasts wouldn’t want to place any weight on their on top of them. Because of its shape, the Windship bottle became known as a mammary bottle. Today, they’re highly prized by collectors and sell for nearly $500 each.

But the Windship bottle wasn’t safe for the baby. The Windship and some subsequent bottles came with a long rubber tube, topped off with a rubber nipple. The tube allowed for hands-free feeding for mothers. These devices also had their problems. Dried formula would clog the tube which was too small to be cleaned, so bacteria blossomed. This feeder became known by the onerous name of the “murder bottle.” New York State banned them in 1906, and other states rapidly followed suit.

The turtle-shaped bottles, begun with the Windship model, remained in use from around 1860 to 1910. The bottles had vents, sometimes on both ends, so that air bubbles wouldn’t enter the milk. A nipple went on one end and a tiny cork on the other.

Most bottles became cylindrical by the beginning of the 20th century. Sterilization also became routine. And by the 1930s, bottle makers began embossing their glass bottles with puppies and kittens. These continued to be used until the invention of the disposable plastic bottle.