Paperweight with a Pear

Object Name: 
Paperweight with a Pear

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Object Name: 
Paperweight with a Pear
Accession Number: 
95.3.14
Dimensions: 
Overall H: 5.5 cm, Diam (max): 7.6 cm
Location: 
On Display
Date: 
1800-1899
Web Description: 
The catalog for a 1978 exhibition of paperweights at The Corning Museum of Glass praised this 19th-century French weight decorated with a pear as “perhaps the most exciting of all fruit weights.” The authors also noted that “fruits in paperweights . . . are by process three-dimensional, which may account for the appeal they have for some over flat flower weights.” The fine execution and unusually convincing leaves of the pear weight make it an outstanding example of the glassmaker’s art. The high dome and the treatment of the ground color are typical of weights made at the Pantin factory near Paris. However, the modeling of the leaves and the pear is similar to that found in weights produced at Saint Louis. Therefore, the pear weight cannot be attributed with certainty to either of these factories.
Provenance: 
Sotheby's, Source
1995-01-26
New York Historical Society Museum and Library, Former Collection
1977-10-18
Category: 
Technique: 
Material: 
Primary Description: 
Paperweight with a Pear. Colorless non-lead glass set with a naturalistically formed pear in shades of orange, growing from a beige stem overlapping two other similarly colored stems and six green leaves, set on an opaque red ground; tooled.
Flowers Which Clothe the Meadows
Venue(s)
Corning Museum of Glass 1978-04-26 through 1978-10-21
The Corning Museum of Glass: A Decade of Glass Collecting 1990-1999 (2000) illustrated, p. 31, #30, top right; BIB# 65446
Recent Important Acquisitions, 38 (1996) illustrated, p. 238, #22; BIB# AI97737
The Corning Museum of Glass Annual Report 1995 (1996) illustrated, p. 7; BIB# AI95180
Story of Glass Coloring Book (1981) illustrated, p. 38, 2nd row, center; BIB# 67749
Paperweights: Flowers Which Clothe the Meadows (1978) illustrated, pp. 98, 164, #296; BIB# 20097