The Art of the Paperweight: The Boston and Sandwich and New England Glass Companies

For about twenty years in the latter half of the nineteenth century both the New England Glass Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company in Sandwich, Massachusetts, made paperweights. Although these paperweights lack the renown of their French counterparts made by the SaintLouis, Baccarat, and Clichy glassworks, they were undeniably influenced by them and by glass from Bohemia, England, and Venice. Indeed, their American makers were themselves immigrants from France, England, and Bohemia.

The outspoken author of The Art of the Paperweight: The Boston & Sandwich and New England Glass Companies provides not only a detailed consideration of motifs and sometimes complex methods of production, but engrossing chapters on the rise and fall of the two glasshouses and their principals. An example of the leisurely pace of the book is a consideration of the clay pots in which the glass was melted.

At the New England Glass Company, when the fires were allowed “to dwindle on Friday morning for the weekend holiday (which ended at midnight Sunday), they examined the pots for cracks caused by the change in temperature and replaced them as necessary.

A dozen workers manned the pot facility, processing approximately 350 tons of clay each year. This was also nasty work. The laborers combined a mixture of new and old clay with water, and then walked barefoot on it for up to two months before pronouncing it ready for pot making. Their reward? A dollar a day, and the early onset of arthritis and bone disease.”

The author fearlessly passes judgment on the aesthetic value of the astonishingly diverse array of paperweights produced by the two companies. He is particularly emphatic about the jasper background, which resembles a fine spatterware glaze on earthenware and was much used at Sandwich.

He writes: “Inspiration for this rarely attractive, usually awful background may spring from immigrant SaintLouis glassworkers, but the millions of colorful pebbles on Cape Cod beaches probably also stimulated the imaginations of the Sandwich artisans. They often utilized a combination of red, white and blue, its patriotic theme the saving grace, to good effect with some flower weights.”

The conclusion, which the author entities Epilogue, is just as pointed: “Like the people of this period, these weights emerge as rugged individualists ready to take on all comers…. From the simplest poinsettia to the most complex double overlay, they proudly proclaim ‘I am an American paperweight’

and truly deserve an honored place in the history of glass.” The native paperweight could not have had a worthier biographer.

The color photographs, almost all by the author, are spectacular, with individual canes and tiny details as crisp as latticinio grounds. The reproduction of the illustrations is enriched by a technique known as spot varnishing. For more about that consult a printer. However, the excellent glossary will explain latticinio and other terms of the paperweight trade, making this study accessible to those with a general interest in American glass as well as to collectors of paperweights