Posted 6 years ago
artfoot
(367 items)
When I recently acquired the candle holder I realized that I had a couple more pieces with an identical decor. It is a cased multicolor spatter, essentially orange-blue-red-yellow, on a transparent violet ground. My thinking is that because of this decor match, the three pieces were all likely made by the same glass house. The small candle holders are probably difficult to differentiate between makers, and as far as I can find, neither other shape has been attributed to a maker.
A tantalizing clue is the export or provenance mark on the underside of one of the three vases. It is an inverted arch that has been described in previous posts as the "smile" mark. It is not acid-etched or sandblasted but instead stamped with enamel. The mark has been seen in gold, silver, and white. It appears, as you can see, on a couple more unattributed shapes in my collection and makes me wonder if these pieces may somehow fit in the same puzzle.
technicolor splendour would fly away any the blues today or morrow
the classification super fantastic to ponder over to deliberate further
flash posting
thanks ever so much for sharing harry my friend
all the very best malkey
Thank you Malkey - always nice to hear from you.
Thanks to everyone for the loves.
I love the very dark background. It really makes the colours stand out. Beautiful.
I agree with your views about these decors, shapes and the 'smile' mark. There were many satin spatter pieces also marked this way, some ovoid baluster vases and some squat posey jars. I think this mark is not a definitive indication of a maker, rather a distributor that worked with the main producers of Czechoslovakia decorative glass during the interwar period. Nice to see the grouping together.
The concept that distributors received glass for export from a manufacturer, unpacked it, marked it, and then repacked it for shipment is an idea which, at least to me, flies in the face of any business logic at all. Even the mildest form of business sense would seem to indicate that marking glass as it was packed to be shipped would have been the prudent way to do it. Exporters would have likely ordered glass, and required marks to be placed before it was packed by the maker. Even Loetz is known to have marked export glass for customers. It is documented in the second Loetz volume of production notes and line art.
Although this discussion has gone on for years, no one has ever presented a reasonable argument explaining why exporters would have wanted to mark a product they ordered themselves.... Especially when a production house could do it as an easy part of the process.
Great effort artfoot and great comments. This mark is of special interest to me because it resembles the style of Kralik and is seen on zipper and gluechip pieces. The problem with the mark is it strolls into Kralik shapes (the generic shapes) then it strolls back out into these types of shapes- that do not contain a single kralik decor.
very interesting artfoot. You can group them together (even without the mark) and see that they are from the same place and time.
as for the zipper I don't believe they are exclusively Kralik and for the gluechip I believe there are more that one maker as well
Thank you all for the input.
MsCrystalShip, if you didn't pick it out of the other comments, it is most likely these date from sometime around the 1930s.