 Welcome to Barn's Takeout, your daily serving of art. I'm Robin Creran, the Collections Research Coordinator at the Barn Foundation. And today I'm going to talk to you about an early American glass pitcher in a Pennsylvania German cupboard on the east wall of room 18, which you can see right in front of you. So I'm going to zoom in so you can see all these beautiful glass pieces. Most of them are early American, they were collected by Dr. Barns in the 1930s. And there are 54 inside of that cupboard. They're often overlooked by visitors, probably because they're behind glass and they're pretty dark. But today we're going to look a little bit more closely at this beautiful pattern molded piece right here. It was created in about 1825 to 1840 in Massachusetts by the Sandwich Glass Company. I'm going to switch to it so that you can see a bit more in detail. So this piece of glass is known as a pattern molded glass or a blown three mold. It would have been gotten its pattern and shape primarily from a mold. And it was blown, it's glass blowing. There are different types of glass making but for the purposes of today we're going to be talking about glass blowing. You're probably familiar with it and you've seen glass blowing demonstration before. You often see them set up at fairs or historic sites or maybe even a Christmas market. That's known as free glass blowing. And like I said, this was created into a mold to create its pattern. So it's known as mold glass blowing. Glass itself often, usually, is made of three different substances, silica, which could be crushed quartz or flint or sand, and that needs a stabilizer, which would be calcium and a flux, which is an alkaline substance, could be potassium carbonate or sodium carbonate. And those three substances make up molded glass, which would then be, which would be melted inside of a glass furnace. And for creating this piece, a glassblower would have put a gather of that molded glass onto a long steel hollow pipe that he would use to blow air into. So he would put a gather onto this steel pipe and then he would roll it over a marver, which is a flat metal surface that the glassblower uses to manipulate the shape of the glass. And he would do this to create this initial shape to then place into a mold. And an assistant would probably help with this. This piece was done with a two-part mold, so it was usually hinged so that they could open it to place the gather into it and then close it to then create the shape and open it again once the shape had been created. But as I mentioned, this type of glass was known as blown three mold. So primarily a good portion of them that were created were created in three piece molds. But this one just two, which probably made it a little bit more simple to make. So they would have placed the gather inside of the mold and closed it. And then the glassblower would have blown air into that gather to expand the glass to push against the pattern of the mold. Now, because it's being pushed out, that means that there is this interesting relationship between the exterior and interior of the glass. So you can feel the reverse of the pattern on the inside. So it's different from another type of glass known as pressed glass, which could look very similar with this kind of pattern on the outside. But because it's pressed into a mold, it has a flat surface. So this is an interesting type of glass because it's pushed out. Now you might also see these small little lines or indentations on the outside of the glass blown like this. This was because the glass pushes into those seams of the hinged mold. But it might be a little bit harder to find in a piece like this because there's only two molds or two pieces to the pattern. But also because a glassblower could smooth out those indentations to make them less apparent. Now, this piece was primarily done in a mold, but there is one portion, the handle, which was actually as hollow and actually would have been attached after the fact. And then also the mouth of the pitcher, although from the mold, would have probably been manipulated afterwards. The glassblower would have done this by reheating the glass after it was taken out of the pattern. And then using different tools like forceps to pull the glass to create something like this mouth. They would also reheat the pitcher to use the same pattern for multiple different kinds of objects. So this is a pitcher, but the same mold could have been used for a decanter or a bowl or a plate. And then, again, they reheat the glass and then pull out the sides for something like a bowl. And then they might drape the pattern over a bowl mold to create that circular shape, that more exaggerated circular shape. The base of this was actually taken from the mold. That pattern comes from there. So let's talk about the pattern itself a bit. This type of glass was categorized into about three different styles. One is geometric, which usually has geometric shapes on it. Arch, which usually has these patterns that mimic Greco-Roman design. And then Baroque, which is this one. So they often have palmettes, trayfoils, scrolls, that kind of thing. This one in particular, if we zoom in a little bit, we can see these five petal palmettes, which are very indicative of this Baroque style. So let's zoom out a little bit and you're going to notice these beaded arches, which repeat all the way around as the palmettes do as well. And they form this arch around these three ribs right here, which come up from the base. And then they all kind of come out from this raid base, which has 32 equal ribs coming out of it. And they all kind of, if you look at it, if you see where the ribs go, they all kind of meet at the base of these ribs, at the base of these beads. It's a really interesting repeated pattern that's very perfect and beautiful. And this type of glass actually came as a response to a European type of glass known as cut or engraved glass. You've probably seen something like it. Waterford crystal is engraved or cut. And that comes from Ireland and England. And at the time it was the big competitor for American glass companies. They really didn't have the skilled labor that they did in Ireland and England. And they were struggling to compete with these companies who are bringing in this really beautiful elaborate glass. And so these companies created these really innovative glass pieces by doing it in a way that was much more cost effective. So they were able to create the look of cut glass by using just one mold, which was costly to produce at the beginning and required some skill. But then they could use this one mold to create four or five different types of pieces. And all they needed was somebody who already knew how to blow glass, who didn't need the same skill that they required to be able to cut or engrave the glass as they did in England and Ireland. So this was a really innovative response from the glass makers of America in a way that allowed them to economically compete with the European counterparts of themselves and allowed for the American glass industry to really prosper during the mid-19th century. And if you're interested in learning a bit more about the early American glass and the history of glass and this piece in particular, you can take a look at a research notes that I wrote back in January. And you'll find that by going to our website to www.barnsfoundation.org slash what's dash on slash research dash notes. And I hope that you'll enjoy today and learning a little bit more about American glass and about this piece in particular. That's it for today's Barnes Takeout. I hope you enjoyed learning. 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