butter dish

One of the Museum’s most noteworthy American acquisitions in 2013 was this very rare pressed covered butter or sweetmeat dish. Attributed to the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, the dish and cover were made just a few years after the invention of the mechanized press. The earliest forms of pressed glass tended to be small or flat items, such as furniture knobs, salts, and plates. This dish is one of the earliest surviving forms that was pressed in a deep, three-part mold and made with a matching cover. The decoration of the cylindrical dish is quite elaborate and imitates expensive cut glass patterns of the same period. On the side, from bottom to top, the design features a band of pointed arches, a narrower band of crosshatched diamonds, and a band of alternating hearts and rosettes. The dome-shaped cover has a matching pattern of diamonds and pointed arches. Such covered dishes were used at the table to hold sweetmeats (candied fruit and sweet confections) or butter, an important household staple shaped into lumps or balls. This dish is one of three or four known examples, including one each in the Toledo Museum of Art and the Sandwich Glass Museum. The third example was formerly in the William J. Elsholz Collection and was shown at the Corning Museum in 1954 in the exhibition “The Story of American Pressed Glass of the Lacy Period, 1825–1850.” The new acquisition may be the Elsholz dish, but it could be a fourth, previously undocumented, example. Unsigned. Unpublished. For more information, see Wilson 1994 (see 2013.4.27), v. 1, p. 304, no. 347 (TMA 1969.146); and James H. Rose, The Story of American Pressed Glass of the Lacy Period, 1825–1850, Corning: The Corning Museum of Glass, 1954, p. 65, cat. no. 34.