STEVENS & WILLIAMS POMPEIAN VASE

Fabulous things are created when great people come together to celebrate beauty. Stevens & Williams had the great good fortune to secure the services of Frederick Carder and John Northwood to head their production of artistic glass in the last quarter of the 19^th century. This piece strongly suggests that these men combined their artistic genius in its making. The techniques of fabrication are necessarily complex in order to achieve the astonishingly beautiful result.

Stevens & Williams created this vase in cased azure blue and rose cranberry glass using an air trap process. In this process, a gather of glass was blown into a dip mold which was lined with glass tubes. The tubes were marvered into the surface of the glass and twisted to provide a spiral effect. The piece was then cased with heat sensitive glass that produced the delicately shaded colorations in this vase. This technique was a specialty at Stevens & Williams. The piece was finished by a light acid bath which resulted in a soft silky finish. 

The finished piece almost magically unifies all these techniques, yielding a treasure both pleasing to the touch and a delight to the eye.

Eye-catching names were essential to marketing glass in this era. Carder called this type of glass “Verre de Soie,” and Stevens & Williams registered the name in 1886. The “Pompeian” label was a further attention getter. Tradition has it that Pompeian glass was made from a secret recipe that included ashes from Mt. Vesuvius, a rumor carefully nurtured by the Stevens & Williams marketing department. (Later during his tenure at Steuben, Carder again used the name “Verre de Soie,” literally “glass of silk,” for one of his iridescent glasses. It did not resemble the S & W glass except for a satiny surface feel and iridescent sheen.)  

The form of this vase is commonly called short gourd but is reflective of oriental sensuousness. Its azure blue and rose cranberry glasses are cased over an opaque white interior. The striped effect in the colors is more pronounced in the lower portion of the piece, but the colors blend into one another in the narrow neck portion, where the blue predominates. It has a polished pontil mark and measures 7 ¼ in. in height. It is virtually undamaged, having only a minute flake at the top of the shoulder and a small potstone to the body, as made. A similar piece is shown in Charles Hajdamach’s volume, English Glass: 1800-1914, p. 316, pl. 38/top right. Hajdamach also discusses the air-trap decoration process, pp. 308-311. Made in Brierley Hill, England, c. 1886, and acquired from Jeffrey Evans Auctions, coming from the collection of Thomas Bredehoft, St. Louisville, OH. 

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