Vintage Crystal Clear Frosted Lily Relief Footed Bowl, c. 1985–2000

The Piece

A footed bowl in satin frosted pressed glass, about ten inches across and low in profile, the sort of centrepiece that was made to sit on a sideboard and catch whatever light the room had. The rim is worked in raised relief with a continuous band of lilies: long trumpet flowers on bent stems, lance shaped leaves laid over one another, and small closed buds filling the gaps. The outer edge finishes in a fine twisted rope moulding that runs the whole circumference.

The well of the bowl is plain and clear by contrast, and the centre carries a small frosted wreath of leaves and berries, so the eye travels from the busy rim across an open field to a quiet medallion. The foot is a short shaped pedestal, undecorated, which keeps the weight in the base and lets the relief work read against whatever the bowl is standing on.

Frosting here is acid or sandblast treatment applied to the raised decoration only, so the flowers sit opaque and white against passages of clear glass. It is the technique that made Lalique famous and that a great many houses used after him, and it is the reason a pressed bowl of this kind photographs so much better than a plain one.

The original gold foil label is still attached in the well, printed with the maker name and the country of manufacture. Labels of this kind were meant to be peeled off by the first owner, so an intact one is worth noting.

History & Provenance

The label reads Crystal Clear, Made in Indonesia. Crystal Clear Industries was an American glass and tabletop house that registered its first trademarks in the early 1980s and ran a substantial giftware programme through the 1990s, commissioning pressed and cut wares abroad and selling them into department stores and gift retailers under its own name. The bulk of its trademark filings fall between 1981 and 2003.

The country of origin is the useful part of the mark. Indonesia developed as a serious supplier of decorative pressed glass to the American import trade from the mid 1980s onward, considerably later than the European and Japanese sources that preceded it. A piece labelled for an American importer and made in Indonesia therefore belongs to the later part of the company history rather than to its beginning, and the style of the label, a small round gold foil disc with a script logo, is consistent with that window.

The design itself looks backward on purpose. Frosted relief floral glass of this type descends from French art glass of the 1920s, and the giftware trade of the 1980s and 1990s reissued the look at a price ordinary households could meet. That is what this bowl is: a late and well made example of a long tradition, not a piece pretending to be older than it is.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Frosted relief glass does something no clear bowl can do, which is hold its shape under a lamp. The raised flowers stay white and legible in low light while the clear field goes to nothing, so the piece reads as a ring of pale blossom floating on a table rather than as a solid object. Fill it with fruit, float a few blooms in it, or leave it empty on a dark wood surface where the rope edge picks up the light. It is also, at this size, one of the few centrepieces that works on a round table without blocking the people sitting at it.