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Description, References and Size

This is a scent bottle with strawberry hobnails to the sides, slanting blazes to the shoulders and radially cut mushroom stopper. Made c.1820-30

This scent bottle might be made by Waterford.

I know, I know, everyone one says Waterford, but if Dudley Westropp thinks perfume bottles like this are probably Waterford, who am I to disagree with him.

Reference: Irish Glass, Phelps Warren, plate 84c

Reference: Irish Glass, Dudley Westropp, plate VIII

Reference: English Bottles and Decanters 1650-1900, Derek C. Davis, Page 57

Height: 3.5 inches

Width: 3.5 inches

This is a glass rinser with comb cutting to the base surmounted by a bordered band of cut stars and blazing stars. Made c.1810

There is a decanter marked for Waterloo Co. Cork in the Phelps Warren book with the exact same frieze around it. The same freize doesn't garantee that it's from the same factory, but there is a good chance it is.

This is not a strange finger bowl it is a glass rinser. Physically the difference is that a glass rinser has two pouring lips on opposite sides (very rarely a rinser may only have one pouring lip). The idea of this piece of tableware is that you can rest your glass in it with bowl in water and the stem of the glass sitting in the pouring lip.

I have variously seen these described as for cooling your glass or for rinsing your glass between different drinks. However it was actually used during dining, we have not used them for a long time and most people don't know what they are. The fact that they are an obsolete piece of tableware makes them cool in my book.

Reference: Irish Glass (pamphlet), Mary Boydell, plate 29

Reference: Irish Glass, Phelps Warren, plate 16A

Height: 3 inches

Length: 5 inches

This is a turn over bowl with a mould pressed square foot, the body with shallow hobnails, surmounted by cut flutes. The folded lip has been cut all over with shallow grooves. Made c.1800

I am unable to attribute this decanter more firmly to any particular Irish glass house.

The turnover bowl is an Irish classic in the glass world, especially when the glass is cut all the way around the turnover. This bowl would probably originally of has a lid to it but that has been lost somehow in the annals of time.

Reference: Irish Glass, Phelps Warren, plates 41c,69d, & 81c

Reference: Irish Glass, Dudley Westropp, XX, XXI, & XXIII

Reference: Irish Glass (pamphlet), Mary Boydell, plates 24, & 28

Height: 4 inches

Width: 4.25 inches

This is a salt boat or bon bon dish, with a star cut base, swags cut to the sides and notches cut to the rim. Made c.1800-1810.

This dish and the one below are not quite like anything else in the books I have, but they did come from Southern Ireland, and motifs in the cutting and the fact they are boat shaped, kind of makes them distinctly Irish.

Most of the Irish boat bowls you see in books are the pedestal type with the pedestal made in press mould. The Dudley Westropp Irish Glass book has a few boat shaped bowls without pedestals but I would say his are less distinctively Irish than these.

Height: 1.5 inches

Length: 4 inches

This is a salt boat or bon bon dish, with a star cut base, a row of husks cut to the sides and notches cut to the rim. Made c.1800-1810.

The row of husks cutting pattern is a distinctly Irish pattern and can be seen on one on the Belfast decanters I have in the Irish Decanters section of the website.

I have put these early dates on these based on the fact that the cutting is spare, leaving a lot of natural glass. This seems to be true of the decanter date, so I have dated these similarly.

Height: 1.5 inches

Length: 4 inches

This is a salt boat or bon bon dish, with a radially cut base with a polished pontil in the centre, cut with swags and a scalloped rim. Made c.1800-1810.

The Dudley Westropp Irish Glass book not only has boat shaped bowls this shape but a suite of glass with swags cut the same way. This bowl is smaller than the two above and is more likely to be an open salt.

Height: 1.25 inches

Length: 3.25 inches

This is a salt boat or bon bon dish, with a radially cut base with a polished pontil in the centre, cut with swags and a scalloped rim. Made c.1800-1810

This jar should have a lid that would have rested on the inner edge of the everted lid. In the Dudley Westropp, Irish Glass book similar glass is shown from factory drawings, these glasses were called Pickle Glasses at the time.

Reference: Irish Glass, Phelps Warren, plates 42a, & 69d

Reference: Irish Glass, Dudley Westropp, plate XXXIV, & page 232

Reference: Irish Glass (pamphlet), Mary Boydell, plate 41

Height: 4.5 inches

Width: 4.5 inches

This is a lemon squeeze footed baluster shaped Irish Georgian cruet, with double bands of fish scale cutting near the top and bottom of the body and a single band of wheat husk cutting around the middle. The shaker top is made of copper with a small amount of its Sheffield plate still showing. This is a Made circa.1790.

I believe this to be an early Irish piece as the fish scale and wheat husk cutting combination is a classic Irish style of the period. Heat rolling thin sheets of silver onto copper and thereby fusing them is how silver plate, then called Sheffield plate, was made before electro plating was invented. The top is made with some precision as just pushing it on holds it in place and somehow this has carried on working for a couple of hundred years without wearing out. It's a really nice elegant little piece.

Another reason to think it is Irish that I bought it on eBay and it came from Belfast without any awareness of what it was by the seller.

Reference: The Arthur Negus Guide to British Glass, John Brooks, page 97

Height: 4.75 inches

Width: 2 inches

This is a pedestal salt boat with lemon squeeze, diamond profile press moulded pedestall, a scalloped rim, and cut with very shallow grooves of diagonal crosses. Made c.1790-1800

I have put quite an early date on this salt boat due to the very tentative nature of the cutting.

I have quite a few similar salt boats, but this one came from Ireland so I am happy to put it in this section. Also, the row of diagonal crosses in another mofit that crops up in Irish glass.

Height: 3 inches

Length: 3.5 inches

This is an Irish amber pedestal salt boat with lemon squeeze, diamond profile press moulded pedestal, a serrated rim, and a bowl press moulded with radiating grooves and horizontaly cut bands. Made c.1800

This salt boat is an example of early uranium glass. Under UV light it flouresces so much that it becomes an opaque. I bought this salt boat from Ireland.

Reference: Old Irish Glass, Walter Harding

Reference: English & Irish Glass, Geoffrey Wills, page 12

Reference: Phaidon Guide to Glass, Felice Mehlman, page 155

Reference: Glass for Collectors, Derek C Davis, page 119

Height: 2.75 inches

Length: 3.75 inches

This is a Anglo-Irish pedestal salt boat with lemon squeeze, diamond profile press moulded pedestal base, a swag on each side of the bowl enclosing shallow cut lines forming diamonds and parallel grooves and a cut serrated rim. Made c.1790.

The reference I have for this salt boat is not an exact match in that the bowl looks to be the same shape and it has some very similar shallow cut grooves but not as many. On the basis I haven't seen grooves cut like this on any other piece of glass I have and this bowl shape is unsual amongst salt boats, my thinking is, it's close enough.

Reference: Irish Glass, Phelps Warren, plate 78c

Height: 3 inches

Length: 3.25 inches