Glass with class: Jack in the Pulpit vases

It’s not just owning a collection of antiques that’s fun. It’s also the enjoyment of hunting for new acquisitions, specially in a new saleroom or location, to say nothing of the excitement of finding something special.
     Adding immensely to the experience is the fellow collectors you meet along the way, some of the encounters adding rich memories to the journey.
    Like the chap we met at an antiques fair who claimed he was “a world expert on Victorian fairings” – crudely potted hard paste porcelain knickknacks that were either prizes or else penny purchase at country fairs.
     He reckoned he’d once discovered a fairing so rare, he had been able to sell it for enough money to buy two first-class plane tickets to New York. We came across him later that day at a church jumble sale, his wife’s arms laden with second-hand clothes. Clearly, similar rarities had evaded him.
    Then there was the lovely retired couple we chatted to over coffee. He was, he said, a collector of “Jack in the pulpit” glass and he had cabinets full of the things, to the point where his wife had insisted some had had to go.
    He’d kept the best, though, and in the pause in the conversation that followed, it was obvious he was waiting for us to ask what a Jack in the pulpit glass was. His disappointment when we didn’t was palpable, but we refrained from boasting about a couple of our own, one of which is particularly lovely.
    What we hadn’t given much thought to was where the name came from, although once you know, it’s obvious, specially if you’re a gardener.
    Jack in the Pulpit, or Ariscema triphyllum, is a plant that originated in woodland in North America where it was used by the native population as a food source and as a medicine to treat sore skin. However, in its raw form, it is highly poisonous and should not be touched without wearing gloves.
    The plant flowers perennially, the old fashioned “pulpit” being formed by a leafy hood beneath which is “Jack”, the spiky, erect flower’s reproductive part. At first glance, it looks like a Sunday-morning preacher ready to give his sermon to anyone passing by.
    Given its American roots (sorry!) it’s perhaps not surprising that one of its admirers was arguably that country’s greatest glassmaker, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848 -1933) who first saw it on his Long Island, New York, estate. As a result, many credit him with being the first to use its name to describe a particular style of glass vase modelled after the plant’s shape.
    I’m not so sure, though. His vases appeared in around 1900, but English glassmakers Stevens & Williams were making similar products half a century earlier. Since then, a myriad of other makers followed and Jack in the Pulpit glassware continues to flow from today’s producers.
    With their slender, sometimes curling stems and coquettish twist to the tip of the “pulpit”, the shape screams Art Nouveau, a decorative arts design period from about 1890-1910 that took its inspiration from nature.
    Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, the New York fancy goods retailer and one of America’s most influential Art Nouveau artist-craftsmen.
     Louis trained as a painter but turned to the decorative arts in 1879, establishing a firm of interior decorators in the city which boasted the American writer Mark Twain among its most prestigious customers.
     However, his international fame was secured as a glassmaker and designer, producing everything from stained glass windows to breathtakingly beautiful lamp shades.
     His vases were made form iridescent glass, produced with a technique he patented in 1894 called favrile, a name derived from fabrile, meaning handmade or belonging to a craftsman.
     Several glass firms made iridescent glass in the early 1900s, but Tiffany's soft, incandescent sheen of lustrous favrile glass, inspired by colours found on excavated antique Syrian and Roman glass, was unique.
     Tiffany’s Jack in the pulpit vases were made in different sizes and colour combinations, achieved by dissolving salts of rare metals in molten glass and keeping them in an oxidised state in the kiln to produce chemical reactions.
     Some were also sprayed with chloride, which made the surface break up into fine lines that picked up the light. Gold lustre is said to have been made from gold coins dissolved in hydrofluoric acid.
    Needless to say, such glassware is financially out of reach for most but the wealthiest of collectors but the interestingly, we found a golden iridescent “Tiffany” Jack in the Pulpit vase decorated with at an upmarket antiques fair last month. It was priced at £285.
     The dealer selling it was quick to point out, however, that the base had been engraved with the Tiffany name in the distant past by some devious chancer. In fact, the vase was made in the Loetz glassworks, founded in 1836 in the Southern Bohemian town of Klostermühle, today part of the Czech Republic. Hence the price.
    Jack in the Pulpit-style glassware has been made in both opaque and in colours such as cranberry, milk, peachblow, and “Vaseline” yellow, more correctly termed uranium glass and the list of makers worldwide who have produced and are still producing it is lengthy.
     But what of Stevens & Williams? Established in Stourbridge in the West Midlands in 1776, the glassworks at Moor Lane, Brierly Hill passed from Richard Honeybourne to Joseph Silver in 1824 and subsequently to William Stevens and Samuel Williams, who each married Silver’s daughters.
    Stevens & Williams was founded in 1847 and became noted in particular for producing quality decorative glass, using techniques such freehand engraving, acid etching, enamelling, and cameo cutting from about 1880 under the direction of John Northwood and his protégé Frederick Carder.
     The firm patented “Damascened” glass in 1885, which featured silver or copper design surfaces; “Jewelled” and “Pearl Satin” glass, the latter looking like mother of pearl, and, in 1888. “Moss-Agate” glass, which gave the effect of crazed semi-transparent alabaster.
     Interestingly, Carder made his name in America where he co-founded the famed Steuben glassworks in Corning, New York
     Stevens & Williams became Royal Brierley Crystal in 1931 following a visit by the Duke and Duchess of York and is now owned by Dartington Ltd.