The Bomford Collection recently bought, with help from the Friends of
Bristol Art Gallery and the Friends of Bristol Museums, Galleries &
Archives, a beautiful piece of Roman cameo glass. Thank you for your
support.
The popularity of cameo glass developed and waned in the space of
about 75 to 100 years in the first century. It is known from about 20
complete pieces and many fragments.
We have no idea of the original size of this piece. The Dutuit
Plaque in the Petit Palais, Paris, may be a close parallel: this is 210 x
190 mm, though made with three layers of glass rather than two. Two
panels from Pompeii measure about 400 x 250 mm.
The Bomford Collection of Ancient Glass
Bristol was a centre for glass making in the 17th, 18th and early 19th
centuries. It was partly to complement the ‘modern’ glass collection
that Bristol bought the Bomford Collection of Ancient Glass, to show the
long history of glass making in the Middle East and Europe.
James Bomford collected over many years until the 1970s. His
interest was at first just the delicate beauty of old objects that had
survived for so long. He then became more interested in the subject,
and started building ‘a representative collection of the many different
techniques employed in those very early times … so that the collection
would be a faithful history of the Ancient Art of Glass Making’.
Bomford collected 175 glass objects or groups of objects. The
collection ranges from a Mesopotamian piece from about 1500 BC, to a
German piece from the 4th century AD. The majority of the
collection reflects three main techniques, core-forming, free-blowing
and mould-blowing, with a few pieces of fused mosaic glass and cast
glass. Within these broad techniques, the collection shows different
ways of making or finishing including grinding, engraving, polishing and
painting. There are six small cameo amulets in the collection, with a
profile or front-facing head on dark coloured glass, but they are very
small, and damaged or discoloured, and do not show the cameo cutting
technique well.
Since acquiring the collection in the 1970s (by purchase, including
private sponsorship, V&A Purchase Grant Fund support and Art Fund
support) Bristol has built on the collection made by Bomford, acquiring
pieces that represent types or techniques not already in the collection,
keeping Bomford’s criteria in mind, that the collection should be a
work of art in itself, that would both educate and entertain visitors.
This cameo fragment is large enough to see the technique used to make
it, and the skill of the cutter in sculpting the face of the young
man. It references the relatively short-lived cameo technique as used
to show scenes on large mouth-blown vessels and on cast inlay plaques,
rather than single heads on cameo amulets. As a small, broken fragment,
this cameo glass has no particular significance in itself: but it
represents a fashionable, luxury craft and trade that would have been
highly valued by its owner, and it fills a large gap in the collection.
We hope to arrange a small display of Bomford glass, including the cameo fragment, but no details yet …
Sue Giles for The Bomford Collection.
