Description
c1890 Mt Washington Crown Milano American art glass hand painted marmalade jar.<br>4" tall x 4" wide with handle with no damage.<br><br><br>MT. WASHINGTON AND PAIRPOINT GLASS<br><br>Mt. Washington and its successor, the Pairpoint Corporation, was one of<br>America’s longest-running luxury glass companies (1837-1957), one that rivaled<br>its better known contemporaries, Tiffany and Steuben. It constantly reinvented<br>and re-invigorated its business through creativity in texture, decoration,<br>pattern, and color - developing a variety of styles and decorating techniques<br>which were so technically complex that few are even practiced today.<br><br>The Mt. Washington Glass Company was founded in South Boston in 1837, and moved<br>to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1870. In 1880, Thomas J. Pairpoint, an English<br>silversmith, was hired to run the Pairpoint Manufacturing Company, another<br>company in New Bedford which Mt. Washington’s owners established to produce<br>ornate silver-plated mounts for Mt. Washington glass.<br><br>In 1894, the Pairpoint Manufacturing Company absorbed Mt. Washington, and the<br>company was renamed the Pairpoint Corporation in 1900, which remained the<br>company’s name until it went out of business in 1938. It was revived briefly as<br>the Gundersen-Pairpoint Glass Company but closed permanently in 1957. The<br>company’s most successful years were from 1880 (in the height of the opulent<br>Gilded Age) to 1930 (the end of the exuberant Roaring Twenties).<br><br>MT. WASHINGTON ART GLASS AND CUT GLASS<br><br>Englishman Frederick Shirley was hired in 1872 to run Mt. Washington’s<br>chandelier department, and two years later was put in charge of the entire<br>company. Shirley was entrepreneurial and litigious, quick to adopt new designs<br>and quick to complain if he thought any other firm was copying his wares. By the<br>time he resigned in 1891, he had amassed a total of 27 patents and five design<br>patents for various types of glass, most of which were quite successful.<br><br>In 1885, Shirley introduced Burmese glass, a translucent glass that shaded from<br>yellow to pink, which was highly decorated in the elegant and sophisticated<br>style characteristic of the day. It became an immediate success on the Art Glass<br>market. Shirley was a good businessman and took advantage of the dawning age of<br>advertising to promote Burmese glass extensively.<br><br>Mt. Washington’s large decorating shop specialized in enameling. The decorators<br>who worked on Burmese glass also applied their skills to a variety of other<br>decorated glasses with exotic names like Royal Flemish, Crown Milano, Colonial,<br>and Pearl Satin Ware. By 1890, the company was advertising itself as<br>“Headquarters in America for Art Glass Wares.”
