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Showing posts from April, 2015

Bristol Vase (not! ) and Mary Gregory Vase (not!)

This is one of two auction wins for this week, a Mary Gregory vase.  Mary Gregory refers to the style of the vase, sometimes white figures of children on a solid background.  Mary Gregory may have been a real person ( 1856-1908) who worked for the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company until the 1880's , but it wasn't until the 1920's that the Westmoreland Glass Company began marketing glass as "Mary Gregory."  A fabricated story circulated that she was a woman who painted pictures of children because she had none of her own.  So "Mary Gregory" now refers to any vase which looks somewhat like the above, not the actual vases that she may or may not have decorated herself.   My second win this week is this opaque painted vase with decals and some applied-by-hand embellishments.  These are now termed "Bristol Vases."   There is a port in England named Bristol, and some say that the term only applies to blue glass; others say the above is really