Pressed Glass Compote With Pineapple Pattern, Attributed to the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company

Details

Description

Pressed Glass Compote with Pineapple Pattern, Attributed to the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company
Circa 1860

A big, generous piece … Read more Pressed Glass Compote with Pineapple Pattern, Attributed to the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company
Circa 1860

A big, generous piece of mid-nineteenth-century American glass, this footed compote was pressed at the moment when the Victorian table fell in love with sparkle. The deep bowl finishes in a boldly scalloped rim and carries six repeating motifs around it, each a rounded teardrop above a field of fine diamond diapering held inside a sweeping arch, cut so crisply that the design catches light from every angle and reads differently as you move around it. It sits on a paneled stem and a wide petal-lobed foot, and the whole thing has the weight and the faint gray cast of good early lead glass.

At ten inches across it has enough presence to hold a dining table on its own. Pile it with lemons, pomegranates or green apples for color, float it with hydrangea heads or a few short-stemmed roses, or use it on a console, a sideboard or the end of a bar cart and let it stay empty, where the pressed pattern does all the work. It is handsome against dark wood and very good against a plain painted wall, and it is one of the easiest ways to put a genuine piece of nineteenth-century American glass into a room that is otherwise entirely modern. It also mixes happily with silver and with plain white porcelain, so it will not fight anything already on the table.

Like nearly all American pressed tableware of this date it carries no factory mark, and it is offered as attributed to the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company on the evidence of its form, its metal and its molded pattern. The design takes its trade name from the pineapple, the old symbol of hospitality, and this is exactly the sort of object a household of the 1860s would have brought out when there was company.

Dimensions
Height: 8 ½ inches (21.6 cm)
Diameter: 10 inches (25.4 cm)

Condition
Good condition.

(Ref: NY9991-crr) See less