Greentown Chocolate Glass Compote "Panelled Agave"/"Cactus" c.1901

Description: This is something quite special - it looks like porcelain, but it's actually a glass compote dish made by the Indiana Tumbler And Goblet Company (usually referred to simply as "Greentown Glass") some time between 1899 and 1903. Glass manufacturing started in Greentown, Indiana in 1894, as one of the outcomes of the Greentown Improvement Association's two-year campaign to bring new industries to the town, through advertising, collecting $5 subscriptions from the citizens, and - as a nearby town's newspaper reported, "laboring diligently and disinterestedly for the upbuilding of our plucky little neighbour on the east". Capitalising on what the newspaper asserted was "the most prolific gas field in all of Christendom", before long the glassmaking factory was up and running and within three years it was building additional furnaces and warehouses in order to meet demand. In 1899 the company became part of a new consortium called the National Glass Company, and a new glass chemist, Jacob Rosenthal, arrived - and introduced his own invention, Chocolate Glass and Golden Agate Glass, to Greentown's range. Chocolate Glass (an attempt in the 1930s to rechristen it the more accurate "Caramel Slag" was sternly repressed by expert glass historians) comes in a range of fawn, milk coffee and darker brown colours. Almost all of it was pressed glass, and this compote is in the "Panelled Agave" or #375 pattern, which was the second line of Chocolate Glass produced by the company. Panelled Agave and Chocolate Glass took the public by storm: Greentown's Union Hotel noted on its 1901 Christmas Dinner menu that "the glass factory ... manufactures the rare Chocolate Glassware that is rapidly making Greentown famous" and a few days later the industry journal China, Glass & Lamps commented that it was "a glass color winner" and "It has proven to be just the sort of a novel color for glass ware that the trade was looking for and it is proving the warmest seller of the season". It was so popular that within weeks four railway cartloads of chocolate glass had left Greentown. Despite its popularity, it wasn't available for very long: one Saturday afternoon in June 1903, after the workers finished their weekend shift, some chemicals that hadn't been stored properly ignited and the factory burned to the ground. Rosenthal moved to Fenton's glassworks, and although they produced some items in chocolate colour, they never achieved the popularity that the Greentown chocolate glass had enjoyed. This compote tells us a lot about the era in which it was made. The design draws on the Victorian passion for unusual botanical specimens and pseudo-classical shapes, on Art Nouveau plant-based inspiration and wavy lines, and on the late 19th and early 20th centuries' enthusiastic pursuit of novelty and technological advancement in any form. While it was very much of its time, it was also sufficiently modern for Fenton's Glass (where Rosenthal moved after the collapse of the National Glass Company) to reissue the Panelled Agave pattern in the 1950s, in new colours - chocolate glass remains a rarity - and under the name "Cactus". The compote appears to be in excellent condition: the slight variations in tone and a few tiny grey ash pitting in the bowl are apparently not regarded as defects by collectors, but merely naturally occurring anomalies in the manufacturing process. There are some fine hairlines inside the pedestal supporting the bowl (see the last picture), but I think they might be from the manufacturing process as well - they seem to me more like swirls in the glass rather than faults, but I'm not an expert. The compote is a beautiful light caramel colour, and while it has the milky opacity of porcelain, when you tap it it rings like fine crystal. Please examine the photographs carefully as they form part of the description! IMPORTANT - PLEASE READ We are a small family business in rural Australia. We go to great lengths to research the items we sell and to identify and describe them as accurately as possible, but, as noted above, we are not experts. 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Price: 120 AUD

Location: Bega, NSW

End Time: 2025-02-10T01:07:56.000Z

Shipping Cost: 33.33 AUD