Delaware Antiques Show 2024

A delicate glass salver in Winterthur’s collection provides a window into shifts in the English glass trade and elite dining practice in the late 1600s. Before the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, England’s domestic glass industry was modest, dwarfed by imports, and heavily reliant on immigrant craftspeople. Granted a charter by Charles II in 1664, London’s Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers initiated a shift that helped inaugurate a golden age for English glass. Though the guild oversaw the importation of vast quantities of Venetian and façon de Venise glass from Europe, it embraced the opportunity to nurture domestic production. A rapidly expanding appetite for luxury tableware, combined with the guild’s efforts, set the stage for George Ravenscroft’s development of industrial-scale lead glass production in the mid-1670s and the subsequent flourishing of English glassmaking. Based on its style and material, Winterthur’s thin, nonlead glass salver (fig. 1) , by a now-unknown maker, predates Ravenscroft’s successes. The salver’s manufacture and fashionable mold-blown ribbing—likely inspired by gadrooning seen on Venetian glass and English silver—made it perfect for genteel tables in the period (fig. 2). For these seventeenth-century diners, glass served a role well beyond functionality. Instead, it was integral to increasingly ostentatious and multisensory feasts. New glass forms offered exploration of changing culinary trends and an opportunity to experience rare and exotic foods, allowing hosts and guests to perform elite social status and enhance satisfaction with the meal. This salver, raised on a tall, trumpet-shaped foot, stood prominently on the table while playing its part in these performances. Highlighted by its central location, the glass’s visibility, delicacy, and implicit value placed it comfortably alongside other lavish, theatrical markers of good taste, including highly trained meat carvers, sculpted fruit, modeled sugar sculptures, and strikingly figured pastry—all carefully designed to enchant guests before the first bite. Fig. 1. Nonlead glass salver (tazza). England, 1655– 75. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Henry Francis du Pont Collectors Circle, 2010.0002 Performance and Pleasure at the Early Modern Table By Graham Titus — 16 —