GLASS OF A THOUSAND FLOWERS

Paperweight Collecting:

If there be a therapeutic value in a hobby, the collecting of millefiori, the glass of a thousand flowers needs no further recommendation. It offers the pursuit of fantasy as an antidote to a too-grim reality. No doubt is requires something of a child-like delight in the illusion of magic, for here, in a single concrete thing, light and color and form are imprisoned. A glass of imagination, captured in the shining crystal swung from the pontil rod of some obscure glass-maker who made it just for fun.

Millefiori glass was a mechanically ingenious product of the nineteenth century. It was a revival, or development, of the ancient Roman art of glass mosaic, practiced in the time of Augustus. The collecting interest in paper weights in the United States possibly dates from 1915 when the late Doctor Edwin Atlee Barber, pioneered student of American glassware and ceramics arranged arranged at the Pennsylvania Museum of Philadelphia an exhibition of millefiori paper weights, ink stands, mirror knobs, and related items which attracted attention.

The process by which the glass maker arrived at these exquisite creations is fascinating. There are many private collectors who have over 250 of these exquisite trifles. Purchases were made at home and abroad which include French and English weights. The creation of these crystal ornaments consisted in placing the "set up" or object to be encased, face down on a mold plate and covering it with an open-top conical ring. Into this ring sufficient molten glass wasp poured to engage the object on the plate. After cooling the ring was removed, the fresh glass and its adhering ornament were picked up on a pontil rod and subjected to successive dipping and shaping until a thick rounded lens had been formed.

In making the canes which comprised the "set up" in the millefiori weights, the workman began by gathering a core of opaque white glass on the end of his blowpipe and rolling it on the marble into a solid cylinder like a long pencil. By repeated dipping in transparent color, he produced a cylindrical solid four to five inches long, with a diameter of two or three inches. The cylinder was then reheated and withdrawn from the furnace. An assistant attached a pontil rod to the free end, then, by moving away from the fellow workman holding the pipe, stretched the relatively thick cylinder of glass. This reduced its diameter from inches to a fraction of an inch. . but in no respects altered the ornamental structure. A rod of glass thus plated was termed a "cane" or "candy". The cross section cut from canes and arranged in the crystal gave the sections cut from the canes and arranged in the crystal gave the appearance of a thousand tiny flowers . . . hence millefiori.


Research credits for this article were extracted from Antiques Magazine, 1945


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