pitcher

This water pitcher, engraved with the name “Emily,” was undoubtedly made as a gift for Emily Burdakin Fillebrown, the engraver’s wife. It descended in the Fillebrown family, and the Museum was able to acquire this and other pieces from the engraver’s great-grandchildren. Henry Fillebrown was the son of Samuel Fillebrown, an English-born glass cutter at the New England Glass Company. Henry was trained at that glasshouse, where he learned engraving in the 1850s. Henry and Emily Fillebrown were married in 1860, and this is one of several pieces that bear her name. From 1865 to 1870, Henry worked at the Hobbs, Brockunier glasshouse in Wheeling, West Virginia. This firm was established by workers who had left the New England Glass Company in the 1840s, and there were many contacts between the companies. Henry returned to the New England firm in 1870, moved to the Meriden (Connecticut) Flint Glass Works in 1877, and retired from engraving in 1880. From the same Fillebrown descendants, the Museum’s Rakow Research Library acquired a book that documents the engraved patterns used by the New England Glass Company in the 1860s. This is the only complete pattern book that is known for the firm, and it is thus very important for documenting patterns that were used there. Fillebrown worked with the engraver Henry B. Leighton, whose father and grandfather were superintendents at the New England company, and the two men continued to work together at Meriden until Leighton died in 1878. Leighton’s initials appear in the pattern book in two places, so it is possible that this volume originally belonged to Henry Leighton. [267 words] For more information on Henry Fillebrown and the pattern book, see Jane Shadel Spillman, “A Glass Engraver’s Design Book, 1860–1880,” The Magazine Antiques, v. 168, no. 2, August 2005, pp. 64–69.