Frosted Glassware

Craquelle and Overshot Glassware

Frosted or iced glassware was a sixteenth-century invention of the Venetians that spread rapidly throughout the Continent after it was successfully copied by Bohemian craftsmen. It was produced by plunging the red-hot glass into cold water and then reheating and reblowing it. This process produced the effect of ice or frosting on the outer surface of the glass, the interior surface remaining smooth to the touch. Although these wares appear to be covered with fractures, they are perfectly sonorous.

Iced Glass

Apsley Pelatt produced what he termed "Venetian Frosted Glass" at his Falcon Glass Works about 1845-1850. Pellatt claimed that the art of making this glass was known and practiced only by the Venetians until revived by him in the mid-nineteenth century, but several examples of this type of glassware, attributed to Spanish and other Continental factories in the seventeenth century, contradict this statement.

Another means for producing an iced effect on a glass body was to roll the inflated gather over a marver that had been previously covered with fragments of pounded glass. The fragments adhered to the plastic metal and the gather was heated again, slightly, and formed into the desired article.

At first, frosted glassware of this type was made only in transparent white or crystal glass simulating ice; but by the mid-nineteenth century fashion decreed it should be colored, and so it was. Transparent ruby, rose, yellow, blue, green and cominations of various colors were either picked up by the plastic gather from the marver or the crumbs of glass were sprinkled on the glass body. More often, though, the body of glass itself was colored, the pounded fragments with which the article was covered being of transparent white or crystal glass. Many kinds of craquelle glass were exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1878 by several European manufacturers.

On October 4, 1883, Hobbs, Brockunier and Company ran a full-page color advertisement illustrating their "Craquelle" glassware in "Rose, Sapphire, Old Gold and Marine Green." Melon-ribbed finger bowls and plates, nappies and cruets, and some leaf-shaped dishes were shown along with many articles of tableware of plainer design. Large bowls with "shell" feet were also illustrated.

Craquelle

Iced glassware, better known to collectors as "Craquelle" and "Overshot" was produced at the Boston and Sandwich Glass Works on Cape Cod, and at the Reading Artistic Glass Works established by Lewis Kremp in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1884. Undoubtedly other American glass factories produced craquelle glass for this ware enjoyed great popularity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Overshot

Source: Nineteenth Century Glass - It's Genesis and Development