H. Blairman & Sons Ltd

Glass: designed by Harry Powell (1853-1922), and manufactured by James Powell & Sons (1834-1924) at the Whitefriars Glass Works

Mounts: designed by W.A.S. Benson (1854-1924) and manufactured by W.A.S. Benson & Co.

Glass and gilded brass

Height: 28 cm

English (London), circa 1900

[ … ]; Brighton Antiques Fair, 30 June 1987; the collection of Peter Rose & Albert Gallichan; Christie’s Aesthetic Odyssey, 30 September 2021, lot 181

Glasgow International Exhibition, Benson Pavilion, 1901

The same models shown at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1903

Franco-British Exhibition, 1908 (possibly)

The Art Journal, 1901, p. 241 (one vase shown on a cabinet on the Benson stand).

The Magazine of Art, 1903

I. Hamerton ed., W.A.S. Benson: Arts and Crafts Luminary and Pioneer of Modern Design, Woodbridge, 2005, pp. 90-1, pl. 66;

C. Gere and M. Whiteway, Nineteenth Century Design: From Pugin to Mackintosh, London, 1993, p. 223, pl. 280

M. Levy, ‘Living with antiques: A collection of Victorian decorative arts’, The Magazine Antiques, June 2000, pp. 948-955, p. 950, pl. iv.

Although these vases, and other similar, were exhibited on three occasions by Benson, equal credit should be given to Harry Powell, who was responsible for the glass.

Harry Powell is widely considered the most creative British glass designer of his generation. He contributed thousands of designs to his family firm between 1876 and his retirement in 1919. He drew on a background in chemistry and an interest in art history to create glassware drawn from a wealth of influences: from ancient Rome through Anglo-Saxon Britain to Renaissance Venice. He achieved a variety of effects in his work, encompassing colours, cutting, engraving and numerous forms of moulding, as well as unions of glass with both fine and base metals; see Andy McConnell, ‘Revolution in Glass’, Apollo, April 2005, pp. 66–71.

Two vases, probably those offered here, can be identified atop a cabinet in Benson’s display in Glasgow, from The Magazine of Art (see right).

The present vases can be confidently identified in a photograph (Hamerton, op. cit., pl. 69, and see right) showing Benson’s exhibit at the seventh Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society exhibition (1903).  The image shows eight vases (three atop the cabinet to the left, and five on the window ledge). They are to the left and right of a vase now in the collection Manchester Metropolitan University: MMU 10284 (Hamerton, op. cit., pl. 67).  According to Ruth Shrigley, ed., Inspired by Design The Arts and Crafts Collection of The Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester Manchester City Art Galleries, 1994, its vase, listed under works by Powell, was purchased from W.A.S. Benson in 1903. The entry states ‘The collection included five other examples by James Powell & Sons’.  The implication, which as yet to be confirmed, is that the other five vases are en suite.  Thus six of the eight vases exhibited in 1903 are now in Manchester, with the two presented here bring the seventh and eighth.

The Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society, Catalogue of the Seventh Exhibition, 1903, records these vases:

‘No. 393

Exhibited by W.A.S. Benson

Designed by W.A.S. Benson

Metal worked by W.A.S. Benson

Responsible Executant J. Lovegrove, assisted by J. Lovegrove and others’

This list refers to all the work exhibited by Benson.

The vases themselves recorded on the following page (p. 150) are described as:

‘EIGHT POWELL GLASS VASES IN BRONZE MOUNTS’

If Manchester acquired six out of the eight vases in 1903, then it is not unlikely that the two shown in the Franco-British Exhibition, 1908, are the present pair.  See Franco-British Exhibition Illustrated Review, London: Chatto & Windus, p. 203 (see right).