Cut and engraved services
The pieces in this group come mainly from the works in the territory of present-day Slovakia, where the firm maintained one of its largest plants and where a strong tradition of cutting and engraving was available to it. The output ranged from complete table services in numbered patterns to individual display pieces in which the refining, rather than the shape, carried the value.
A cut service was sold as a system: tumblers, wine glasses in several sizes, a water jug, a decanter and finger bowls, all sharing one decor and one profile. The pattern books record these as sets, and the catalogues then priced them by the dozen. Because the individual components separated over time, a documented example of one glass often makes it possible to identify the rest of a service scattered across several collections.
Technique is noted with each object where it can be determined — whether a facet was cut or pressed, whether an engraved motif was wheel-cut or etched, whether a matt ground was produced mechanically or with acid. These distinctions matter for dating: the same decor was frequently reissued in a cheaper technique once demand had been proved.
Services as systems
A numbered service was designed as a family. The profile of the bowl, the proportion of the stem and the depth of the cutting were carried across every component so that a wine glass and a finger bowl from the same pattern read as one object seen at different scales. Catalogues sold them by the dozen and assumed the buyer would order the set entire.
Reconstructing a service from scattered survivals is therefore a legitimate research exercise rather than an antiquarian one. Two glasses that share a cutting pattern and a foot profile almost certainly share a pattern number, even when neither carries a mark; the plates reproduced in this archive are what makes that identification possible.