Collectors' notes.

A glass globe reproduced at the Warner House

Joyce Geary Volk, who wrote the fascinating article about the discovery and restoration of the unusual smalt wall treatment in the parlor bedchamber of the Warner House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (see pp. 66-71), has also written to us about her work on another mystery presented by the house. Listed in the front parlor in the inventory taken at the time of Jonathan Warner's death in 1814 was a "glass globe," but how big it might have been or what purpose it served were uncertain. Happily, her research unearthed sufficient clues to re-create the globe and its role. Volk writes:

In her useful book, At Home: The American Family, 1750-1870, Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett, quotes from letters and other records that document glass globes (some of them coated with mercury so that they were mirrored) used in American houses dating from 1771 to 1807; (1) and Arlene Palmer, a noted American glass expert, has told me about several inventory references to such globes. However, no surviving examples are known, nor are any paintings, prints, or other illustrations that picture them in use in this country in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. (2) Interestingly, however, several Dutch paintings of the late seventeenth century depict interiors that include hanging glass globes, among them Johannes Vermeer's Allegory of the Faith, illustrated at right.

Thomas M. Hardiman Jr., the keeper of the Portsmouth Athenaeum, remembered a mention of glass globes years ago in Alice Winchester's column "Riddles and Replies" in The Magazine ANTIQUES, and Elizabeth Stillinger helped me locate it in the September 1940 issue (pp. 134-136). Winchester was responding to a question about "witch balls" and described hollow glass spheres that were used as covers for pitchers, bowls, and so on and also as floats for fishing nets. She referred to Frederick William Hunter's Stiegel Glass (1914; reprinted Dover, New York, 1950), which discusses Henry William Stiegel's three glass factories in Pennsylvania between about 1765 and 1774. Illustrated as Figure 23 in Hunter is a glass globe 6 1/2 inches in diameter identified as a "White Flint Lamp Reflector" and described in the text (p. 209) as "[g]lobular, with short neck for cork ... [t]hese reflectors were intended to be filled with water and hung before a lamp."

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About the globular water container, Winchester remarked, "Hunter's suggestion is altogether plausible if we recall the water-filled globes, built into a pedestal with a handle, that were used by ...