Footnotes

Provenance
Bonhams sale 4 June 2008, lot 317
Julius and Ann Kaplan Collection

This fascinating flask belongs to a small group of opaque white glass items probably made in a single workshop in South Staffordshire in the late 1750s. William Beilby was apprenticed in 1755 to John Haseldine, a copper box enameller from Birmingham and while no enamel boxes can be attributed either to Haseldine or to Beilby, there is strong circumstantial evidence that Beilby may have enamelled locally-made opaque-white glass under Haseldine's tutelage. Indeed, Haseldine and Beilby may have been responsible for this series of opaque white flasks, some of which feature transfer-printing. A flask in the Victoria and Albert Museum with a leopard hunt is printed in black and painted over in enamel colours, see Robert Charleston, 'Decoration on Glass, Part 4 - Printing', Glass Circle Journal 3 (1979), pp.22-23, figs.1 and 2.

A very similar flask to the present lot, in the Corning Museum, is decorated with a staghunt and inscribed 'MAT'ew STUBS Esq. 1757', see the Journal of Glass Studies, Vol.40 (1998), p.148, fig.18. The Corning flask and the present lot both relate to a carafe formerly in Broadfield House also dated 1757, see Simon Cottle, 'The Other Beilbys: British Enamelled Glass of the 18th Century', Apollo, Vol. CXXIV (October 1986), p.317, fig.5.

The subject of a wildfowler used on this flask is also found painted in opaque-white enamel on clear glass and provides a link to the Beilby workshop. A number of wine glasses are known with the same subject by Beilby, including lot 25 in this sale. Another was in the A.C. Hubbard Jr. Collection while a third example was in the Sir Hugh Dawson Collection illustrated by Robert Charleston, English Glass (1984), pl.41f. A further clear glass flask with a wildfowler in opaque white is attributed to Beilby. This example in the Ashmolean Museum is inscribed Thomas Brown, Nenthead, 1769, see James Rush, A Beilby Odyssey (1987), p.69, pl.29.