Hand Cut Cathedral Glass Mosaic Bottle, Brass Collar, c. 1955–1975

The Bottle

A flattened oval glass bottle clad entirely in hand cut stained glass, set in a pale sanded grout. Deep ruby fills both faces. A band of amber runs the full perimeter and carries up over the shoulders, so the piece reads red from the front and gold from the edge.

Three or four pale mauve tesserae sit in the middle of the red field on each face. They are not accidents. Whoever laid this chose them and placed them at the center, and they catch light differently from everything around them.

The neck is finished with a brass collar over the glass, and the bottle closes with a cork stopper.

History & Provenance

The piece is unmarked, so it has to be read from how it was made, and it turns out to have a good deal to say.

The tesserae are cut from sheet glass, not molded or tumbled. The edges show the conchoidal flaking a glass cutter or a mosaic nipper leaves, no two pieces repeat, and where an edge catches the light it runs the faint green of ordinary soda lime sheet seen end on. Several pieces carry visible striations through the body of the glass, the reaming of hand rolled cathedral or semi antique sheet. This is window glass, cut by hand, laid one piece at a time.

The grout is a cream colored sanded cement, coarse enough that the aggregate reads at arm's length. It was floated over the whole surface and wiped back, the way a tile setter grouts, rather than buttered behind each piece.

The most interesting thing on the object is underneath the glass. The bottle beneath is a molded commercial bottle, and raised lettering runs across it along with a vertical mold seam. Both are visible through the transparent red tesserae. The mosaic covers most of the text and it cannot be read out, but the substrate is a factory bottle that someone took out of circulation and made into something else.

That is the whole character of the piece. Glass on glass mosaic ran through American craft from the years after the war into the nineteen seventies, and cladding a bottle was one of the things people did with it. The floor for the dating is the availability of cathedral glass and sanded grout to a home worker, which is the nineteen fifties onward. The ceiling comes from the work itself. Hand nipped cathedral glass and pale cement grout are not what the later import mosaic trade produces, which runs to uniform machine cut tesserae, mirrored and iridized glass, and dark grout. Nothing here points later than the nineteen seventies.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Backlight is what this object wants. The tesserae are transparent, not opaque tile, so a window sill or a shelf with a lamp behind it turns the whole body into color and the grout lines into a dark lead like web. Away from light it reads as a quiet red and gold form. Those are two different objects and you get both.

The scale suits a mantel, a bar shelf, a bathroom counter or a bookcase, anywhere a small piece can hold a spot of strong color without committing the room to anything.

For a dealer or a designer, the appeal is that it is genuinely handmade and reads that way at close range. The pieces are irregular, the border was laid with care, and the mauve accents in the center of each face are a decision rather than a pattern. It is the kind of thing that photographs well, prices approachably, and does not look like anything else on the shelf.