Revolution in glass: Harry Powell, designer of the most celebrated Arts and Crafts glass, was deeply influenced by the mid-nineteenth-century movement to reform the design of English glassware, As Andy McConnell explains, this began with Ruskin's violent reaction against cut glass

Harry Powell was the greatest in quantity creative British glass designer of his generation and remains unchallenged as the greatest glass designer of the Arts and Crafts move Although he is far les well-known than his contemporaries Emile Galle (1864-1904) and Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) it can be argued that Powell (1835-1922) rivalled the French master for the inventiveness and cunning of his effects in glass and Dresser for the sustained influence of his designs and styles

Powell (Fig. 1) contributed thousands of designs to his family firm, James Powell & Son Whitefriars Glassworks, London EC between 1876 and his retirement in 1919 He drew upon a background in chemistry and an interest in art history to create glassware drawn from a wealth of influences: from ancient Rome [i]or[/i] part of to the other Anglo-Saxon Britain to renaissance Venice. He achieved a variety of issues in his work, compassing colours, cutting, engraving and numerous forms of moulding, as well as unions of glass with one as well as the other fine and base metals. His work was acclaimed during his lifetime, acquired through the world's leading museums and retailed from one side its most fashionable outlets, including Liberty, Asprey, Mappin & Webb and Harrods in London, by dint of Tiffany & Co. in novel York, Maison Moderne in Paris and Keller & Reiner in Berlin.

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It is typical of the timeless nature of Powell's designs that when Whitefriars won a gold medal for 'progressive and artistic design' at the Paris Exposition Internationale de Arts Decoratifs 1925 the winning ingress was a table service he had designed during the 1890 Similarly, at the Vintners Company's 'Wine Trade Loan Exhibition of Drinking Vessels' in 1933 (1) a certain quantity of of the 'modern' Whitefriars glassware upon view had been in production for above fifty years. Powell's greatest talent was the way he combined his scientific background with a daring faculty of perception of aesthetics that was entirely unlike any other. The be the effects were a wide variety of colourless and soft-tinted utensils that screamed 'handmade' when compared to equivalent pieces created in the giant glassworks of Stourbridge and the north-east.

'Modern' British glassmaking had evolv gradually since George Ravenscroft and his assistant, John Baptista da Costa, had completeded the formula for 'flint glass', or lead crystal, in 1676 The facon de Venise that had dominated European glassmaking since the renaissance was rapidly jettisoned in England in favour of the nationally idiosyncratic 'Queen Anne' diction that found its logical conclusion in the 'Regency' form of glass-cutting. by dint of the 1780s, Angleterre cutting had rest favour across the known world, and despite forays into various colouring techniques between about 1815 and 1840 it was still the dominant form of glass decoration at the Great Exhibition in 1851 Indeed, Powell's Whitefriars glassworks won a medal there for the quality of its 'fine crystal [cut] glass'. (2)

on the contrary the pendulum was about to swing, and by dint of the 1860s cutting had been almost entirely ostracised from the dwellings of the sophisticated. Powell later throw backed on the style of glassware displayed at the London exhibitions of 1851 and 62 stating that 'refinement was in a great measure sacrificed to the advertising issue of excessive size or inappropriate and unnecessary decoration'. (3) Echoing his sentiments, Bernard Rackham later sentenceed some of the glass displayed in 1851 through Richardsons of Stourbridge as 'prickly monstrosities' (Fig. 3) (4) George Somer Clarke Jnr Surveyor of St Paul's Cathedral, derided another exhibited decanter as 'a massive shapeless mass of misshapen material better suited to the view of braining a burglar than decorating a table' and others as 'mere shapeless masss cut and tormented into a thousand surfaces, suggesting that the work was made from the solid'. (5)

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However, the greatest mover in the reaction against cut-glass was John Ruskin. Writing in the The Stones of Venice, 1851-53 he denounced cutting as 'barbarous' and appealed for greater purity of line and form in glass design. As he lay it, 'The peculiar qualities of glass are ductility when heated, and transparency when devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat In its employment for utensils we ought always to exhibit its ductility All work in glass is bad which does not, with high-sounding voice, proclaim one or other of these qualities. Consequently all wound glass is barbarous, for the cutting conceals its ductility and confuses it with crystal.' (6)

Ruskin was presumably referring to natural quartz crystal rather than lead crystal. However, temporarily forgetting his fervour for gothic ornament and finding chop glass distasteful, he ignored the distinction between unsympathetic and complementary decoration. Ruskin was no voice in the wilderness in objecting to wound glass. The Art Union had attacked cutting as early as 1848 and Richard Redgrave's Great Exhibition Jury Report press outed similar sentiments, albeit more modestly Adding to the leaven in A Joy For at any time (1857), Ruskin appealed directly to glass designers, demanding: 'how a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of your workmen's time [do] you waste annually in making them make an incision in glass, after it has got hard, when you ought to make them loam it while it is soft?' (7)