FOREWORD

Pink Dogwood Bract

Patterns and fiction
     
     With a lot of research into flowers (and Goofus Glass)  , it has become apparent, to me at least, that a good many well-meaning  collectors, frantically seeking to attach a name to a favorite piece,  tend to try and fit every piece they encounter into one of several neat, "botanically correct" boxes, (e.g. Roses, poppies, carnations, dahlias, dogwoods). In a few notable cases they do happen to match natural examples very closely.  In other cases they just don't come close.  One of my favorite examples is the dogwood blossom.  Would someone please send me just one actual, close-up color photograph of a real dogwood blossom with more than four bract or leaves, and particularly big and red ?  A real dogwood pattern is depicted above.   

     I have warned before that the early glass companies frequently gave numbers to mould patterns - and for assortments,  went off into "La La Land" to pick crazy names for a line of pieces such as "Oriental Art",  "Egyptian Intaglio", "Egyptian Art",  "Golden Oriental", "Khedive".  It was produced by the barrel.  The manufacturer seldom gave individual pieces names.  The names we do see may frequently have originated from the fertile imagination of a wholesaler, or collector rather than from the maker also.  It is also known that not every glass manufacturer had their own decorating facility and decorating houses such as the Oriental Glass Company may have been instrumental in assigning their own names to various lines of glass. Painting glass bought from "others" was rampant in the late 19th and early 20th century.  Even Limoge and Havilland china was purchased to be painted. 

     Wholesalers were very careful to distance themselves from the maker and to obscure the sources so as to direct buyers to themselves and not back to the manufacturer.  They would probably not want to even let customers relate their names to the manufacturer's pattern numbers. This has really made perusing old ads rather disappointing to say the least, but it has been noted that if one piece in an ad could be attributed, chances were, the entire grouping in the ad was from the same manufacturer.  Thus ads are a very fertile and immensely valuable tool to study.   However, I dearly wish every manufacturer had marked his pieces with a distinctive mark as Northwood did for some (but not all) of his pieces -- and a date   Wouldn't that have been super to just be able to flip a piece and see the mark and a year of manufacture? Whoever used paper tags was way off base.  Bear in mind, though, these pieces sold for very little.

     I share sentiments exactly  in the musings of Mrs. Marion T. Hartung  (Fourth Book of Carnival Glass) who dug extensively  into glass patterns and produced some of the best pattern guides available to researchers, when she stated:
 

The Last Supper Plate.  First made by Model Flint Glass   Co. in 1903 and then by Indiana Glass Company, for   nearly 50 years till 1960.  11" long x 6-3/4" wide. The   original Model Flint mold allegedly had a crude halo   emanating   from around the Christ' figure's head.     Sometimes called  a bread tray.  It weighs 1 lb 13-3/4   oz. Made in clear glass and noted for its 3D effect   in   the room details behind. Modern scholars debate if   the figure to the left of Jesus might have been intend -   ed   to be Mary Magdalene, his wife, and the intended   "Golden Chalice".  I like to keep an open mind.   Reproductions known. A smaller variety exists, 5-3/8"   x 3 -3/8".