Burmese glass is a type of opaque colored art glass, shading from

yellow Yellow is the color between green and orange on the spectrum of light. It is evoked by light with a dominant wavelength of roughly 575585 nm. It is a primary color in subtractive color systems, used in painting or color printing. In t ...

, blue or green to

pink Pink is a pale tint of red, the color of the Dianthus plumarius, pink flower. It was first used as a color name in the late 17th century. According to surveys in Europe and the United States, pink is the color most often associated with charm, p ...

. It is found in either the rare original "shiny" finish or the more common "satin" finish. It is used for table

glass Glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline solid, non-crystalline) solid. Because it is often transparency and translucency, transparent and chemically inert, glass has found widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in window pane ...

and small, ornamental vases and dressing table articles. It was made in 1885 by the Mount Washington Glass Company of

New Bedford, Massachusetts New Bedford is a city in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States. It is located on the Acushnet River in what is known as the South Coast region. At the 2020 census, New Bedford had a population of 101,079, making it the state's ninth-l ...

, USA. ''Burmese glass'' found favor with

Queen Victoria Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until Death and state funeral of Queen Victoria, her death in January 1901. Her reign of 63 year ...

. From 1886, the British company of Thomas Webb & Sons was licensed to produce the glass. Their version, known as ''Queen's Burmeseware'', which was used for tableware and decorative glass, often with painted decoration. Burmese was also made after 1970 by the Fenton art glass company. Burmese was originally a uranium glass. The original formula to produce Burmese Glass contained uranium oxide with tincture of

gold Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal ...

added. The uranium oxide produced the inherent soft yellow color of Burmese glass. Because of the added gold, the characteristic pink blush of color of Burmese was fashioned by re-heating the object in the furnace (the "Glory Hole"). The length of time in the furnace will determine the intensity of the color. Strangely, if the object is subjected to the heat again, it will return to the original yellow color. In the 1980s, Fenton Glass Company began producing a product it called “Blue Burmese”, based on a formula developed in 1886 by chemist Frederick Shirley of the Mt. Washington Glass Company. Shirley's formula substituted cobalt and/or copper oxide for uranium oxide, producing pale blue glasses rather than the original pale yellow. Mt Washington Glass Company had referred to its similarly coloured glasses, made of ruby glass with added cobalt, as "Peachblow" or "Peach Skin"; it was not commercially successful.

References

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