which have been preserved in public collections. It is strange that so little interest has been taken in a craft in which for some thirty years England surpassed all competitors, creating a wave of fashion which influenced the glass industry throughout the whole of Europe.
In the report of the Excise Commission a list is given of the glass manufactories which paid the excise duty in 1833. There were 105 factories in England, 10 in Scotland and 10 in Ireland. In England the chief centres of the industry were Bristol, Birmingham, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Stourbridge and York. Plate-glass was made by Messrs Cookson of Newcastle, and by the British Plate Glass Company of Ravenhead. Crown and German sheet-glass were made by Messrs Chance & Hartley of Birmingham. The London glass-works were those of Apsley Pellatt of Blackfriars, Christie of Stangate, and William Holmes of Whitefriars. In Scotland there were works in Glasgow, Leith and Portobello. In Ireland there were works in Belfast, Cork, Dublin and Waterford. The famous Waterford works were in the hands of Gatchell & Co.
India.—Pliny states (Nat. Hist. xxxvi. 26, 66) that no glass was to be compared to the Indian, and gives as a reason that it was made from broken crystal; and in another passage (xii. 19, 42) he says that the Troglodytes brought to Ocelis (Ghella near Bab-el-Mandeb) objects of glass. We have, however, very little knowledge of Indian glass of any considerable antiquity. A few small vessels have been found in the “topes,” as in that at Manikiala in the Punjab, which probably dates from about the Christian era; but they exhibit no remarkable character, and fragments found at Brahmanabad are hardly distinguishable from Roman glass of the imperial period. The chronicle of the Sinhalese kings, the Mahavamsa, however, asserts that mirrors of glittering glass were carried in procession in 306 B.C., and beads like gems, and windows with ornaments like jewels, are also mentioned at about the same date. If there really was an important manufacture of glass in Ceylon at this early time, that island perhaps furnished the Indian glass of Pliny. In the later part of the 17th century some glass decorated with enamel was made at Delhi. A specimen is in the Indian section of the South Kensington Museum. Glass is made in several parts of India—as Patna and Mysore—by very simple and primitive methods, and the results are correspondingly defective. Black, green, red, blue and yellow glasses are made, which contain a large proportion of alkali and are readily fusible. The greater part is worked into bangles, but some small bottles are blown (Buchanan, Journey through Mysore, i. 147, iii. 369).
Persia.—No very remarkable specimens of Persian glass are known in Europe, with the exception of some vessels of blue glass richly decorated with gold. These probably date from the 17th century, for Chardin tells us that the windows of the tomb of Shah Abbas II. (ob. 1666), at Kum, were “de cristal peint d’or et d’azur.” At the present day bottles and drinking-vessels are made in Persia which in texture and quality differ little from ordinary Venetian glass of the 16th or 17th centuries, while in form they exactly resemble those which may be seen in the engravings in Chardin’s Travels.
China.—The history of the manufacture of glass in China is obscure, but the common opinion that it was learnt from the Europeans in the 17th century seems to be erroneous. A writer in the Mémoires concernant les Chinois (ii. 46) states on the authority of the annals of the Han dynasty that the emperor Wu-ti (140 B.C.) had a manufactory of the kind of glass called “lieou-li” (probably a form of opaque glass), that in the beginning of the 3rd century of our era the emperor Tsaou-tsaou received from the West a considerable present of glasses of all colours, and that soon after a glass-maker came into the country who taught the art to the natives.
The Wei dynasty, to which Tsaou-tsaou belonged, reigned in northern China, and at this day a considerable manufacture of glass is carried on at Po-shan-hien in Shantung, which it would seem has existed for a long period. The Rev. A. Williamson (Journeys in North China, i. 131) says that the glass is extremely pure, and is made from the rocks in the neighbourhood. The rocks are probably of quartz, i.e. rock crystal, a correspondence with Pliny’s statement respecting Indian glass which seems deserving of attention.
Whether the making of glass in China was an original discovery of that ingenious people, or was derived via Ceylon from Egypt, cannot perhaps be now ascertained; the manufacture has, however, never greatly extended itself in China. The case has been the converse of that of the Romans; the latter had no fine pottery, and therefore employed glass as the material for vessels of an ornamental kind, for table services and the like. The Chinese, on the contrary, having from an early period had excellent porcelain, have been careless about the manufacture of glass. A Chinese writer, however, mentions the manufacture of a huge vase in A.D. 627, and in 1154 Edrisi (first climate, tenth section) mentions Chinese glass. A glass vase about a foot high is preserved at Nara in Japan, and is alleged to have been placed there in the 8th century. It seems probable that this is of Chinese manufacture. A writer in the Mémoires concernant les Chinois (ii. 463 and 477), writing about 1770, says that there was then a glass-house at Peking, where every year a good number of vases were made, some requiring great labour because nothing was blown (rien n’est soufflé), meaning no doubt that the ornamentation was produced not by blowing and moulding, but by cutting. This factory was, however, merely an appendage to the imperial magnificence. The earliest articles of Chinese glass the date of which has been ascertained, which have been noticed, are some bearing the name of the emperor Kienlung (1735–1795), one of which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
In the manufacture of ornamental glass the leading idea in China seems to be the imitation of natural stones. The coloured glass is usually not of one bright colour throughout, but semi-transparent and marbled; the colours in many instances are singularly fine and harmonious. As in 1770, carving or cutting is the chief method by which ornament is produced, the vessels being blown very solid.
Bibliography.—Georg Agricola, De re metallica (Basel, 1556); Percy Bate, English Table Glass (n.d.); G. Bontemps, Guide du verrier (Paris, 1868); Edward Dillon, Glass (London, 1907); C. C. Edgar, “Graeco-Egyptian Glass,” Catalogue du Musée du Caire (1905); Sir A. W. Franks, Guide to Glass Room in British Museum (1888); Rev. A. Hallen, “Glass-making in Sussex,” Scottish Antiquary, No. 28 (1893); Albert Hartshorne, Old English Glasses (London); E. W. Hulme, “English Glass-making in XVI. and XVII. Centuries,” The Antiquary, Nos. 59, 60, 63, 64, 65; Alexander Nesbitt, “Glass,” Art Handbook, Victoria and Albert Museum; E. Peligot, Le Verre, son histoire, sa fabrication (Paris, 1878); Apsley Pellatt, Curiosities of Glass-making (London, 1849); F. Petrie, Tell-el-Amarna, Egypt Exploration Fund (1894); “Egypt,” sect. Art; H. J. Powell, “Cut Glass,” Journal Society of Arts, No. 2795; C. H. Read, “Saracenic Glass,” Archaeologia, vol. 58, part 1.; Juan F. Riano, “Spanish Arts,” Art Handbook, Victoria and Albert Museum; H. Schuermans, “Muranese and Altarist Glass Workers,” eleven letters: Bulletins des commissions royales (Brussels, 1883, 1891). For the United States, see vol. x. of Reports of the 12th Census, pp. 949-1000, and Special Report of Census of Manufactures (1905), Part III., pp. 837-935. (A. Ne.; H. J. P.)
GLASS, STAINED. All coloured glass is, strictly speaking, “stained” by some metallic oxide added to it in the process of manufacture. But the term “stained glass” is popularly, as well as technically, used in a more limited sense, and is understood to refer to stained glass windows. Still the words “stained glass” do not fully describe what is meant; for the glass in coloured windows is for the most part not only stained but painted. Such painting was, however, until comparatively modern times, used only to give details of drawing and to define form. The colour in a stained glass window was not painted on the glass but incorporated in it, mixed with it in the making—whence the term “pot-metal” by which self-coloured glass is known, i.e. glass coloured in the melting pot.
A medieval window was consequently a patchwork of variously coloured pieces. And the earlier its date the more surely was it a mosaic, not in the form of tesserae, but in the manner known as “opus sectile.” Shaped pieces of coloured glass were, that is to say, put together like the parts of a puzzle. The
