Steuben Glass Works

Sotheby Parke-Bernet New York, November 29-30, 1974, lot 162

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Paul V. Gardner, The Glass of Frederick Carder, New York, 1971, no. XII, fig. A (for a related example)

Paul N. Perrot, Paul V. Gardner and James S. Plant, Steuben: Seventy Years of American Glassmaking, New York, 1974, p. 50, no. 2 (for a related example in the collection of Corning Museum of Glass)

Mary Jean Madigan, Steuben Glass: An American Tradition in Crystal, New York, 1982, pp. 50-51 (for the example cited above)

Reactive glass is a material that changes colors when reintroduced to intense heat. Both Louis Tiffany and Frederick Carder utilized this type of glass in their production. While the former focused its use in his transparent and translucent “paperweight” vases, Carder developed an opaque glassware that he called “Tyrian,” the name inspired by the famous imperial purple fabrics made in ancient Tyre.

The glass was an unusual shade of green, something between pistachio and sage, when it first came out of the furnace. The glass, however, would turn a beautiful greyish purple when a section of the partially formed vase was briefly introduced to the furnace’s glory hole. The piece was then fully developed on the blow pipe and finely decorated with iridescent gold Aurene heart-shaped leaves among an intricate network of matching glass. The finer examples, such as the vase offered here, were further enhanced with an applied iridescent blue neck having an “intarsia” decoration of intersecting white and gold Aurene zig-zags.

-Paul Doros