Antique Hand Blown Canary Yellow Glass Bud Vase, c. 1880–1930

The Piece

A small bud vase blown in canary yellow glass, the body a long teardrop swelling low and drawing up into a slender neck that finishes in a collared lip. It stands about seven inches and sits comfortably in one hand. The colour is the first thing anyone will say about it: a saturated acid yellow with a green cast that goes luminous the moment light passes through it, the tone the nineteenth century trade sold as canary.

The lip is applied. A separate ring of glass has been laid onto the neck and worked with a tool, and it sits proud of the wall with its profile thickening and thinning as it travels round. Where the ring meets the neck there is a visible join. Nothing about it is symmetrical in the way a moulded rim is symmetrical.

The base carries a deep push up, domed and set slightly off centre, and at the middle of that dome is a rough irregular patch of disturbed glass. Around it the metal is crowded with seed bubbles, dozens of them, large and small and unevenly distributed, the signature of a batch that was never fully refined.

Over the body runs a fine branching network of pale lines, denser at the shoulder and the lower neck, with scattered dark specks caught in the surface. It gives the glass a soft bloom that breaks up the light rather than reflecting it cleanly.

History & Provenance

There is no mark, no label and no paper on this vase, so the dating is built entirely from how it was made. Three features carry it.

The applied lip is the first. A vessel formed in a mould carries a seam that runs up the neck and continues straight over the top of the rim, because the rim is formed by the mould along with everything else. This one has no such seam. The ring was added by hand after the body was blown and then tooled into shape, which is a finishing method that belongs to hand production and was displaced by automatic machinery through the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The second is the base. The rough disturbed patch at the centre of the push up reads as a pontil scar, the mark left where an iron rod held the piece while the lip was worked and was then snapped away. On American utilitarian glass the pontil is largely gone by the middle 1870s, replaced by the snap tool. Decorative and art glass held onto the pontil considerably longer, particularly in the European workshops, so the mark here argues for hand production rather than for one narrow decade.

The third is the batch. Seed bubbles in this quantity and this range of sizes indicate glass that was not fined out, which is normal for smaller works and for earlier production and is not what a twentieth century factory produced.

A word on the colour, offered openly rather than claimed. Canary yellow of this particular tone is most often uranium glass, coloured with uranium oxide, which the trade later nicknamed vaseline glass. Uranium colouring runs from the 1830s, peaks from the 1880s through the 1920s, and stops entirely in the United States between 1942 and 1958 when the government requisitioned the supply. Uranium glass fluoresces bright green under ultraviolet light, which is how it is confirmed. This vase has not been tested under ultraviolet and is therefore described as canary yellow rather than as uranium glass. A buyer with a blacklight can settle it in a moment.

The surface bloom is consistent with long standing, either as mineral deposit from water left in the vase over years or as early devitrification of the glass itself. It supports age without fixing it, and it has been left alone rather than polished out.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

One stem is all this wants, and that is the argument for it. A single ranunculus or a sprig of something from the garden in a neck this narrow reads as deliberate in a way an armful in a big vase never does, and the yellow does the rest. Against a dark shelf, a walnut sideboard or a painted wall it throws colour the way a piece of stained glass does, because the light comes through it rather than off it.

The bloom on the surface is not a defect to work around, it is the reason the object looks its age from across the room. Polished bright this would be a pretty yellow vase; left as it is, it reads as something that has been somewhere. Group it with two or three other small blown pieces at different heights on a window ledge and it will do more work than its size suggests.