Rare Opalescent Optic Molded Art Glass Miniature Oil Lamp, S1-536

 
"PARIS" Art Glass Night Lamp, S1-536

About 8 1/8" tall to top of shade

About 4 3/4" tall to top of collar

About 3" wide at base

Shade about 3 3/4" in diameter at fitter

Background & history:  Shown in Figure 536 of Frank & Ruth Smith's book "Miniature Lamps", this lamp, when its found (which is not very often), is found in cranberry glass (with either clear or amber applied feet), in amber glass, in green glass, in Amberina glass with amber applied feet, and very occasionally in this pink shading to light green opalescent glass with Vaseline glass feet.  Hulsebus (in the 2006 edition of the "Price Guide for Miniature Lamps" rates all variations of this lamp as being "rare" (see the note below on our use of these ratings in eBay listings).  Consistent with this rating, in the past 12+ years, we've only seen a very few examples offered at live auctions and only a single similar (with a spherical rather than ovoid font) offered on eBay.  So this is a lamp which we believe is unlikely to show up on the market again anytime in the next several years.

What makes this lamp so unusual and attractive, we believe, is the combination of several expensive and time consuming glass making techniques used in its manufacture. 

First, both the shade and the base are faintly paneled.  This faint paneling is achieved, according to Catherine Thuro ("Oil Lamps II"), by a technique known as "optic molding".  In order to produce a lamp with a "soft undulating pattern seen through a smooth exterior. .  .two molds were used; a patterned one and a larger plain one.  A gather of glass was first blown into the smaller patterned mold to produce a [piece] with relatively large and distinct protrusions. . . .Still attached to the blowpipe the [piece] was removed from the patterned mold and placed inside the smooth larger mold.  When the glass blower further expanded the [piece] against the smooth interior of the mold, it forced thick projections to the inside of the [piece] for the desired effect.  The softness of the pattern distinguishes optic-molded [pieces] from the faceted or shaped designs made by pressing." (Thuro, Oil Lamps II, page 11).

Second both the shade and the font are made of at least two layers of glass--an inner pink layer which fades away as you move downward on both pieces leaving just the outer layer of a pale green Vaseline glass.  We believe that the outer layer of glass was made with some heat sensitive elements so that after the glass began to cool, it was placed at the entrance to the "glory hole" and reheated.  This reheating caused the heat sensitive elements to turn a milky white giving the glass its opalescence.

Next, the light green color of the outer layer of glass was created by the addition of uranium oxide to the molten glass mixture.  This technique is described in the note below on fluorescence in colored glass.  The uranium in the mixture causes the glass to glow, or fluoresce brightly under "black" light (see the second photo).

Finally, a skilled glass maker hand applied the shell shaped feet and decorative leaves projecting up from the feet.  In the case of this lamp, these feet and leaves were also made of fluorescent glass. 

Clearly the manufacture of this lamp was a time consuming and expensive operation.  Lamps like this were not intended as mass market items and were certainly made in only limited quantities explaining why they are so hard to find today.

While our reference books provide no information about who manufactured this lamp or when it was manufactured, we found this lamp pictured in a William R. Noe circular produced, we believe around 1900.  While our copy of this circular (titled simply "Circular No. 10") has text that is only somewhat readable, we can see that this lamp was called by Noe "Paris".  According to Ann McDonald ("Evolution of the Night Lamp") Noe was an "amazing entrepreneur" who acted primarily as an importer and wholesaler of lamps with offices in New York and Hamburg, Germany as well as a manufacturer (with factories in Brooklyn, New York and in New York City).  We suspect that Noe imported the glass parts of this lamp from Europe via his Hamburg offices and had it assembled into a lamp in his Brooklyn brass goods factory.  This would explain why Noe's lamps all had U. S. made hardware even if the glass originated in Germany or other parts of Europe.  Noe had an extensive line of lamps and lighting devices/parts and seemed to specialize in night lamps.  His line of night lamps ranged from very inexpensive (retailing for as low as $0.05 apiece) to signficantly more expensive and elegant lamps.

Condition of this lamp:  While still quite striking and beautiful, this lamp does have a few manufacturing defects and one small flake/chip.  The manufacturing defects are primarily several bubbles in the glass and several dark (carbon?) inclusions.  Several of these can be seen in the eighth and eleventh photos.  The only large one of these (seen in the eighth photo) may actually be an oil stain which seeped into the glass between the font and the applied leaf.  It runs vertically and appears to be about 3/4" high by perhaps 1/16" in width.  There is also a small (about 1/4" long by about 1/8" high with about a 1/16" v-chip at one side) shallow flake on the outer edge of the shade fitter.  The applied feet and petals are in good condition with no discernible chips.

The old brass collar (which, along with the burner and tripod, has been polished) is tightly affixed to the font and has no splits or dents.  A Nutmeg burner screws tightly into the collar. The burner's thumb wheel is marked "P & A MFG CO" on the front and "MADE IN U.S.A." on the back.  The thumb wheel adjusts the wick that is in this lamp as it should. The tripod fits snugly over the burner gallery and holds the shade securely in place.  The tripod is an old style tripod made out of three segments of square cross-section brass stock joined together with brass clips.

To the best of our knowledge this is the first complete example of this lamp offered on eBay in the past 12+ years (although we've seen one other similar lamp on eBay).  It is truly "rare".  It is extremely attractive and is a fine example of Victorian art glass dating from around the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries.

Fluorescence in Colored Glass

Uranium (in the form of uranium dioxide, or "uranium salts") has been used as a coloring agent in glass at least since the early 1800s, and perhaps as early as Roman times.  Some credit its first use to Josef Reidel in Bohemia in the 1830s.  Its use as a coloring agent clearly came from the bright yellow color of uranium salts in their raw state.  When used as the only, or the primary, coloring agent, uranium imparts a yellow or yellow-green color to the resulting glass.  However, it is often used in combination with other coloring agents to create other colors--most commonly green and sometimes bright blue.  When used in combination with tin oxide (which by itself is used to create an opaque white glass--which we call milk glass), uranium creates "custard" glass.  It is also used as component of a light green opaque glass commonly called "jadeite".  And, Uranium was used as a constituent in Mount Washington Glass Company's formula for "Burmese" glass. 

Although certainly unknown to early glass makers, uranium's radioactivity causes the glass with which it is made to fluoresce (or glow) a bright green, or yellow-green, color when viewed under long wave ultra-violet (UVA or "black") light.  The amount of uranium used in the making of the glass was generally relatively small (about 1 pound for every 62 pounds of other constituents) and poses no health hazard at all.  Even being in the presence of very large amounts of glass colored with uranium exposes one to no more radiation than that emitted by a television or a microwave oven. 

In the United States we generally call transparent yellow or green glass which glows under black light "Vaseline" glass (in the U.K. "Vaseline glass" generally refers to opalescent glass which may also have been made with uranium).  According to purists, other colors of uranium fluorescent glass should be called "uranium glass" and not "Vaseline glass".  Other chemical compounds used in glass-making can also cause the glass to fluoresce.  While the only true test of whether a piece of glass contains uranium is by measuring the radiation with a Geiger counter, we believe that it is safe to assume that a piece of yellow, green or blue glass which glows very brightly when viewed under ultra-violet light was made by the addition of uranium as at least one coloring agent.

The use of uranium as a glass coloring agent was prohibited, for obvious reasons, in the U. S. and Britain from about 1940 and until the 1960s.  Since the 1960s, the uranium used in glass making is depleted uranium which does not fluoresce as brightly as the pre-1940 uranium, or Vaseline, glass.

[Note that is can be quite challenging to get an accurate (i.e., that looks the same as what one sees with their eyes) photograph of the fluorescence in the glass.  We work hard to get a photograph that looks like what we see, but there is usually some minor discrepancy either in the exact color or amount of the fluorescence.  Should you examine a fluorescent lamp under black light, in a darkened environment, it will glow, but may not look exactly like the photograph we provided.]

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