YELLOW VERRE DE SOIE

It’s time to retire the color name Yellow Verre de Soie. This color name was created decades ago by collectors (no reference to the name has been found in any Carder or Steuben material yet) to describe a soft yellow colored glass that had a finish like Verre de Soie. The name made sense because the finish matched that of Verre de Soie and no one knew what was the underlying base glass that produced the color. We now do. It’s Topaz that has been iridized. Up until about a year ago, if we had seen this base glass “un-iridized” we would have called it Citron Yellow but now we know from Greg Merkel’s x-ray fluorescence analysis that what we used to call Citron Yellow is actually Topaz. Marshall Ketchum correctly deduced the connection between Iridized Topaz (a color name found in the line drawings) and Yellow Verre de Soie when populating the current website, but, since he didn’t know what Iridized Topaz looked like, he labeled the pieces with the generally accepted collectors’ name Yellow Verre de Soie. Now that we know what the glass is, we can refer to it with the name from the line drawings, Iridized Topaz, and retire the less accurate name, Yellow Verre de Soie.

While we are on the subject of Verre de Soie with color we should also banish any notion from our minds of a color called Blue Verre de Soie. Like Yellow Verre de Soie, no reference has been found to this term in any Carder or Steuben materials either. I am aware that Jerry Philpot attempted to get Carder to acknowledge the term in the Fieldstone Porch recordings but Carder doesn’t take the bait. Carder described Verre de Soie as “thin glass crystal (author’s note – crystal means colorless) sprayed with metallic chloride.” There is no indication here (or anywhere else yet) that Carder ever intended Verre de Soie to be anything other than a colorless, iridized glass. Thus, adding a color name preceding VDS has no basis since there is no indication that Carder ever intended VDS to refer to an iridized transparent colored glass. There are VDS objects with decoration added in colors such as blue, green, ruby, yellow or black but there is no reason or precedent to create a new color name simply because some of the decoration has been iridized. So, for instance, we often see blue handles, finials, stoppers or even a foot associated with a VDS object and the blue is iridized (the underlying glass is Celeste Blue). Those objects can be referred to as VDS with an iridized (handle, finial, stopper, foot, etc.) as the case may be.

Scott Hansen

If You Missed The Rockwell Museum Video Friday

Rockwell Museum Carder Steuben Glass 2000

If you have access on your television set to YouTube you can find the video in full size television by searching “Rockwell Museum Carder Steuben Glass 2000” After completing watching this video YouTube played on with a CBS piece on the closing of the Steuben factory in recent years, and other videos on glass blowing at CMoG. Lots available to see.