Enamelled, gilded and pressed glass
The pieces shown here span the earliest and the most productive periods of the firm. The oldest of them predate 1874 and belong to the tradition of pale-tinted blown glass finished with painted enamels and gilding — a labour-intensive product in which the decorator’s hand mattered more than the mould. Vases, beakers and small covered vessels of this type were made in modest numbers and were priced accordingly.
Against them stand the pressed wares that came to dominate the firm’s output from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Pressing allowed a decor that had previously been cut by hand to be reproduced identically thousands of times, and the pattern books show how quickly the assortment grew once the technique was established. Bowls, footed dishes, salt cellars, sugar basins and the components of table services were issued in long numbered series, with the same body offered in several sizes and in more than one colour of metal.
Dimensions and inventory numbers are given with each photograph where they are recorded. Reading them against the drawings in the pattern books is the quickest way to date an unmarked piece: the mould number usually survives on the object even when every paper record of it has been lost.
From hand decoration to the mould
The shift visible across this group is the central story of the firm’s first fifty years. Enamel painting and gilding were applied by hand, one vessel at a time, by decorators whose work can sometimes be told apart within a single series. Pressing reversed that logic: the effort moved from the decorator to the mould-maker, and once the mould existed the marginal cost of a piece collapsed.
What did not change was the vocabulary of ornament. Patterns first developed for cut glass were translated into pressed versions, and the same motifs recur across three decades in progressively cheaper techniques. That continuity is useful for identification but treacherous for dating, which is why the mould number matters more than the decor.