Glass

Islamic Glass in The Corning Museum of Glass, Volume One by David Whitehouse (Hudson Hills Press) The Corning Museum of Glass houses one of the largest and richest collections of early Islamic glass in the United States. This volume, the first in a projected series of three, presents 595 objects and fragments made (with two possible exceptions) in the Islamic world between the eighth and 11th centuries.

The catalog is divided into three sections, labeled A—C, on the basis of technique. Section A offers 44 objects with scratch-engraved ornament. The 444 monochrome pieces in section B are decorated with facet, linear, slant, or relief cutting. Three objects decorated with disks and related motifs, or by molding and cutting, are also found in this section. Section C contains 94 cameo glasses, including 28 with linear and/or slant cutting and 64 with relief cutting. The book concludes with three appendixes that discuss the Corning Hedwig beaker, an unusual polychrome fragment of uncertain date, and eight fragments of carved rock crystal.

Almost two-thirds of these pieces were formerly in the collection of Ray Winfield Smith, whose great interest in the early history of glass prompted him to acquire an extensive assortment of potentially informative fragments as well as display pieces. Many of these are published here for the first time. The Museum's holdings were also enriched by the acquisition of objects that were formerly in the collections of Maurice Nahman of Cairo, Egypt, and Jerome Strauss.

Each catalog entry consists of a detailed description, usually accompanied by a comment on the history and significance of the object and by a listing of similar pieces in other collections. Every object and fragment is illustrated with a color photograph and a line drawing that shows the profile. The book also provides concordances and an extensive bibliography.

Future volumes in this series will describe the Museum's undecorated, pressed, mold-blown, stained, and gilded and enameled objects.

He has coordinated several landmark exhibitions at the Museum, including "Glass of the Sultans" (2001), which was also presented in New York City and Athens, and "Glass of the Caesars" (1987), and he co-authored the catalogs that were published in conjunction with those shows. His most recent exhibitions at Corning were "Medieval Glass for Popes, Princes, and Peasants" (2010), "Reflecting Antiquity: Modern Glass Inspired by Ancient Rome" (with The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007) and "Drawing upon Nature: Studies for the Blaschkas' Glass Models" (2007), and he was co-author of the books that were published to accompany those shows.

In the 1990 volume of the Journal of Glass Studies, Dr. Whitehouse co-authored a monograph on the Portland Vase. He is the compiler of Glass: A Pocket Dictionary of Terms Commonly Used to Describe Glass and Glassmaking (rev ed., 2006) and the author of English Cameo Glass in The Corning Museum of Glass (1994); Excavations at ed-Dur (Umm al-Qaiwain, United Arab Emirates), v. 1, The Glass Vessels (1998); and The Corning Museum of Glass: A Decade of Glass Collecting, 1990-1999 (2000).

Dr. Whitehouse studied archeology at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. From 1966 to 1973, while holding the Wainwright Fellowship at Oxford University, he directed excavations at Siraf on the Persian Gulf. Subsequently, he was director of The British Institute of Afghan Studies in Kabul, Afghanistan, and The British School at Rome. Dr. Whitehouse is a former president of the Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia, Storia e Storia dell'Arte in Roma (1980-1981) and the International Association for the History of Glass (1991-1995). He has published widely on archeology in Europe and the Middle East, and on Roman, Islamic, and medieval glass.

Other Collection Catalogs by the Corning Museum of Glass:

Roman Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass, Volume One by David Whitehouse [381 pages, 484 color plates, 37 halftones, 607 line drawings, $185] (Hudson Hills Press)

Roman Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass, Volume Two by David Whitehouse [368 pages, 494 color plates, 384 line drawings, $185] (Hudson Hills Press)

Roman Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass, Volume Three by David Whitehouse [236 pages, 341 color plates, 257 line drawings, $125] (Hudson Hills Press)

Sasanian and Post-Sasanian Glass in The Corning Museum of Glass by David Whitehouse [112 pages, 74 color plates, 82 line drawings, $65] (Hudson Hills Press)

This is the first volume of a projected three-part 1 series devoted to the early Islamic glass in The Corning Museum of Glass. The second and third volumes are intended to describe the Museum's undecorated, pressed, mold-blown, stained, and gilded and enameled objects. The present volume contains descriptions of 595 objects and fragments made (with two possible exceptions, 585 and 586) in the Islamic world between the eighth and 11th centuries A.D.

The Museum's collection of scratch-engraved and wheel-cut early Islamic glass is both rich and varied. Its strength is derived from several sources. Between 1950 and 1979, the Museum steadily acquired objects in the marketplace, and on a modest scale it continues to do so. In 1953, for example, it acquired 91 small Roman and Islamic vessels from Maurice Nahman of Cairo, Egypt, which (it is reasonable to suppose) were probably found in Egypt; 27 of these objects appear in this volume. The Museum's holdings of early Islamic glass were enriched in a spectacular manner by a series of acquisitions from the collection of Ray Winfield Smith, beginning in 1959. Mr. Smith was deeply interested in the early history of glass, and he was an avid collector of potentially informative fragments as well as display pieces (Anon. 1982). The Museum's decision to acquire literally hundreds of Smith's fragments in addition to many of his "museum-quality" objects preserved a remarkable collection of study material. These holdings were expanded in 1976 when Carl Berkowitz and Derek Content donated further fragments from the Smith Collection. A total of 394 pieces from the collection (including two objects [494 and 523] and 79 fragments of cameo glass) are published here, the majority for the first time. Smith's interest in early glass extended to working with Edward V. Sayre of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in a pioneering project to determine the chemical composition of selected objects by spectrographic analysis (Smith 1964).

Another outstanding acquisition consisted of the collection of more than 2,400 glass drinking vessels formed by Jerome Strauss (Perrot 1978). The Museum acquired the entire collection through gifts and a bequest from Mr. Strauss, and gifts from The Ruth Bryan Strauss Memorial Foundation. This volume includes 46 objects from the Strauss Collection.

The scope of the collection, and in particular the large number of fragments, provides an opportunity to try to isolate different styles of ornament. This opportunity is addressed in the Discussion on pages 329-331.

By the first century B.C., glassworkers in the Mediterranean region were experienced in finishing some of their products by cutting, grinding, and polishing, just as lapidaries finished objects of precious and semiprecious stone (Weinberg 1992, p. 105, no. 62, etc.). Within the next hundred years, glass cutting became one of the most popular techniques of finishing fine glassware in the Roman Empire (Glass of the Caesars 1987, pp. 180-181). We know very little about the tools used for this purpose, although information about the working of semiprecious stones (preserved, for example, in Book 36 of Pliny's Natural History) probably applies equally to the coldworking of glass; indeed, it is not unlikely that the same craftsmen worked in both materials. By the late second or early third century, Roman finishing shops were also producing glass with cut and polished decoration, and details scratched in the surface with a pointed tool (Whitehouse 1997, pp. 222 and 237-246, nos. 401417). In the fourth century, some glasses were decorated by scratch engraving alone (Glass of the Caesars 1987, pp. 184-185 and 226-230, nos. 126-128).

Wheel cutting, which was practiced extensively not only by the Romans but also by their contemporaries, the Sasanians, in Iran and Iraq, declined in the Mediterranean region after the fourth or fifth century, and scratch engraving disappeared. Cutting, however, continued in Western Asia, although it is not yet clear how much cut glass was made in the late Sasanian and very early Islamic periods (Whitehouse 2005, pp. 41-57). Nevertheless, by the eighth to ninth centuries, both cutting and scratch engraving were once again parts of the repertoire of glassworkers in the central Islamic lands.

1. The Contents of the Catalog

Almost all of the cut and engraved objects in this catalog range in date between the eighth and 11th centuries. They are divided into three sections, labeled A—C, on the basis of technique. Section A describes 44 objects that were decorated by scratching the design with a hand-held tool mounted with a chip of diamond or some other very hard mineral, such as topaz or corundum; section B contains 447 monochrome objects or fragments of objects with cold-worked decoration, usually cut and polished on the wheel, but sometimes accompanied by filing; and section C presents 94 pieces of cameo glass. Sections B and C are subdivided in terms of decoration or finishing techniques. In all three sections, and within each subdivision, open forms are described before closed forms, in the following order: dishes, bowls, cups, beakers, goblets, jars, bottles, pitchers, ewers, and indeterminate. Within each form, the ornament is presented as follows: humans, animals, birds, palmettes and half-palmettes, other vegetal motifs, inscriptions, and indeterminate.

The categories are:

A. Objects with scratch-engraved ornament (1-44).

B. Monochrome objects with wheel-cut ornament (45-491).

1. Facet-cut objects (45-117).

2. Objects decorated with disks and related motifs (118-141).

3. Linear-cut objects (142-249).

4. Slant-cut objects (250-295).

5. Relief-cut objects (296-488).

6. Objects decorated by molding and cutting (489-491).

C. Cameo glass (492-585).

1. Linear- and/or slant-cut objects (494-521).

2. Relief-cut objects (522-585).

Three appendixes describe the Corning Hedwig beaker (586), an unusual polychrome fragment of uncertain date (587), and fragments of carved rock crystal (588-595), one of which (590) may have come from a ewer similar to the celebrated ewers described by Lamm (1929-30, pp. 191-194, pls. 65.4-67.1-4 and 67.7) and many others, and reviewed most recently in Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds 2008 (pp. 62-71, lot 50).

2. Catalog Entries

Each entry contains as much as is known of the following information:

1. Catalog number and name.

2. Date, find-place, previous collections,

and accession number.

3. Dimensions.

4. Description.

5. Condition.

6. Comment.

7. Bibliography.

1. Catalog number and name. Catalog numbers are arbitrary. Names are either generic (e.g., bowl) or the names by which the specific objects are known (e.g., the Corning Ewer).

2. Date, find-place, previous collections, and accession number. Date: Unless otherwise stated, all dates are A.D. Only 19 of the objects (7, 12, 53, 75, 85, 88, 96, 99, 123, 144, 176, 192, 212, 226. 234, 361, 380, 456, and 529) come from well-documented archeological contexts, and the dates in this catalog, therefore, are suggested mainly on the basis of comparisons with similar objects that were recovered by archeologists in association with other, datable material. Find-place: In most cases, places where objects are reported to have been found or acquired are prefaced by the phrase "said to have been found at/acquired in." Place names appear without qualification only when the information is independently corroborated; in such cases, further details are given in the "Comment." Previous collections: This is a list of all known previous owners (other than dealers), in chronological order. Accession number: The Museum's three-part accession numbers record, first, the year in which the object was acquired; second, the area of the collection to which it was assigned (area 1 comprises all ancient and Islamic glass); and finally, the cumulative number of objects acquired in that area during the year.

3. Dimensions. All dimensions are in centimeters (cm). The following abbreviations are used: D. (diameter), Dim. (dimension), est. (estimated), ext. (exterior),

H. (height), int. (interior), L. (length), Max. (maxim, Min. (minimum), Th. (thickness: a single dimension describes a relatively consistent thickness; otherwise the thickness is given as a range e.g., 0.4-0.5 cm, descriptions of relief-cut glass and cameo glass, T' [total thickness] refers to the combined thickness the wall and the ornament), and W. (width). In descriptions of relief-cut objects, the thicknesses the wall (or floor) and the ornament are also record separately.

4. Description. Descriptions proceed from the t, of the object to the bottom. The glass is described transparent, translucent, or opaque. The colors a described, arbitrarily, as very light, light, dark, or ye dark. The term "colorless" is reserved for glass that assumed (or known) to have been intentionally decolorized.

5. Condition. Objects that are essentially without damage are described as "intact"; objects that have been damaged and repaired without loss are describe( as "complete." The condition of other damaged objects, as well as the appearance and extent of weathering, is briefly stated.

The description of some objects from the Smith Collection notes the presence of a small circular perforation. These perforations, it is believed, were made by Mr. Smith in order to conduct chemical analyses of the glass.

The phrase "flood mud" occasionally appears in catalog entries. It refers to deposits of brown silt that are found on a number of objects in the collection. The silt was deposited on and immediately after June 23, 1972, when, in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Agnes, a flood devastated Corning, New York; at the Museum, the water rose to a level of more than 1.5 meters (five feet) above the floor (Martin 1977). In the months following this catastrophe, the great majority of the flooded objects were cleaned, but a few still retain traces of silt.

6. Comment. This may include additional information on the technique, subject matter, and history of the object, and a discussion of comparable material. It is intended to provide the reader with information about more detailed studies of related objects.

7. Bibliography. The entries are confined to publications of the object in question. Publications that describe parallels and related material are cited in the "Comment."

20th Century Glass by Judith Miller (DK Collector's Guides: DK Publishing) Exploring one of the fastest growing collecting areas, the DK Collector's Guides: 20th Century Glass covers all the designers, designs, and movements that are regularly collected. From Art Deco and Studio Glass to Bohemian and Scandinavian, the book has over 1,110 individually priced items.

Running from vases and bowls to lamps and outright sculpture, this collector’s guide highlights notable glassware of the past century that transcends the pedestrian and has proven to be fine art. Miller, an antiques expert and co-founder of the bestselling Miller’s Antiques Price Guide, organizes the book primarily by type of glass (e.g., blown, pressed, iridescent), but she also includes concise histories of glass designers and factories. She provides illustrated looks at the hallmark traits of each style as well as carefully captioned examples of select pieces from each genre. Collectors will love the fact that she estimates the value of each piece shown in the book: Tiffany & Co Crocus table lamp, $30,000-$40,000; green glass dragon paperweight $30-50. Such price estimates establish Miller’s book as an important research and educational tool, and may send even casual readers running about to appraise the items in their homes. As thorough as it is, the book isn’t written with much sparkle. But die-hard collectors will hardly be looking for lyric verse in this volume—they’ll be looking for information, and this book unquestionably gives them that. 1,000+ illustrations. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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