Lily-Pad Pitcher Brings $40,900
| January 28th, 2013
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From left: $40,900 and $11,200. |
A medium blue circa 1852 Lancaster Glass Works type 1 crossed lily-pad pitcher, 8¼" high, sold for $40,900 (includes buyer’s premium) when Glass International closed its latest absentee auction on December 1, 2012. According to the auction house, the price is the highest paid to date at public auction for an American blue lily-pad pitcher.
The pitcher has a globular body with a long narrow threaded cylindrical neck, and the body is decorated with superimposed type 1 lily pads using both a “crisscross” design and a secondary design that places the armature of each pad so that they not only face one another but actually touch. It has an applied wide strap handle with medial ridge and large thumb lug, applied crimped foot, and pontil scar.
A sugar bowl made between 1840 and 1850, a type 3A, attributed to Matthew Johnson, sold for $11,200. It had been found in a box lot at an auction in Mount Holly, New Jersey. The color of the sugar is sea green, at times looking like turquoise. The lily-pad decoration, a type 3A, is one of the rarest variants yet encountered on any lily-pad sugar bowl. The only 3A lily-pad decoration known to collectors was used by Matthew Johnson at Stoddard Glass Works in decorating one of his larger pitchers. The lid of the sugar bowl had been purposely cut so as to rest a spoon, indicating that this large bowl may have been used for jam as well as for sugar.
For more information, contact Glass International at (609) 714-2595; Web site (www..historicalglass.com).
Originally published in the February 2013 issue of Maine Antique Digest. © 2013 Maine Antique Digest
