A Dorflinger masterpiece: an exceptional cut-glass and silver pitcher exemplifies the staying power of high quality.(END notes)

Objects of high quality continue to bring strong prices," says Jason Woody of Woody Auction, headquartered in Douglass, Kansas, following the firm's sale late last year of the cut-glass and silver pitcher shown here. Made in the first decade of the twentieth century by the Dorflinger glass company of White Mills, Pennsylvania, the piece is an extremely fine example of what is known as American brilliant period cut glass, which dominated the market for luxury glass for some thirty years, between about 1880 and 1910, according to Jane Shadel Spillman, curator of American glass at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. Add the color, the silver mount made by Tiffany and Company, and the probable original owner, and it is little wonder that when the gavel fell, the pitcher had brought $49,000.

Spillman observes that colored American cut glass is very rare, and Dorflinger was one of the few firms that made it. Occasionally it was made of a single glass layer, but two or even three layers were more impressive--and more expensive, requiring greater skill on the part of both the mixer and the blower to create layers that were of uniform thickness and had no air bubbles in between. The dark red color (often called cranberry) on this piece is cut through to clear, as was most typical.

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Engraved on the elaborate silver mount is the monogram "SVS," believed to be that of Sidney V. Stratton (1845--1921), a Natchez-born New York City architect who is thought to have been the original owner. The cutting is in Dorflinger's number 99 pattern, but the form is not recorded in the firm's catalogues, which together with the size and elaboration of the pitcher indicate that it was made to special order. The Tiffany and Company mark on the mount is the one used between 1902 and 1907.