Pair of verre églonisé urn shape vases with covers and gilt bronze mounts. Covers lined in gold, with gilt metal acanthus leaf finials, red and blue glass with gilt decoration and inscriptions. Vases decorated with laurel wreaths surrounding crowned V&A monogram and national emblems.

Prince Albert’s artistic adviser, Ludwig Grüner, reflected the Prince’s interest in encouraging the marriage of good design with new manufacturing processes accompanied by a bold and rich palette.

This pair of vases was designed by Grüner and executed by the Birmingham manufacturers Jennens & Bettridge by means of a ‘patented process’ of decoration, which involved the application of hundreds of tiny glass beads to the painted and partly foiled interiors of the glass vases. Such a process can only have been executed painstakingly by hand and was, for this reason, not likely to have proved an outstanding commercial success. The lower parts of the vases are set in pierced mountings of electro-gilt metal executed by Messrs. Elkington and Mason, also of Birmingham.’ Elkingtons were well placed for this collaboration and were similarly engaged in developing new techniques.

Jennens & Bettridge made their name as the leading manufacturers of papiermâché in the mid-nineteenth century by introducing modern, industrial techniques to the production of a very wide variety of light furniture and popular small objects, such as inkstands, trays, boxes and stationery racks. They employed between three and four hundred workers at their Birmingham factory and were among the foremost contributors of furniture and decorative objects in this quintessentially Victorian material at the Great Exhibition. Less well known is this firm’s highly decorated glass ware, of which this pair of vases is probably the best documented and most lavish surviving example.

The vases appeared among other gifts in a watercolour of the Queen’s birthday table at Osborne in 1856.

Text adapted from Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, London, 2010