Iridescent Glass Vide-Poche with Organic Undulating Rim — Circa 1950

This small bowl is an exercise in luminous surface and organic form. The glass carries an iridescent treatment of exceptional quality — a metallic lustre that shifts across the full range of the blue-purple-green spectrum as the piece moves through light, the interior pooling with violet and the exterior catching teal and deep peacock green. The rim is freely worked, its undulating contour suggesting something between a pinched clay vessel and a natural form — a shell, perhaps, or a water-worn stone — giving the piece an informal vitality that contrasts pleasingly with the jewel-like intensity of its surface.

The technique of iridescent glass treatment — achieved through the application of metallic oxide vapours to hot glass — is associated with a long tradition of decorative glassmaking stretching from the workshops of ancient Rome, through the innovations of the nineteenth-century art glass movement, to the mid-twentieth century revival of lustre effects in the hands of studio potters and glass artists. Pieces of this type, with their deep, moody colour ranges and their freely worked forms, reflect an interest in material sensuousness and organic irregularity that ran through European decorative craft of the 1940s and 1950s.

At 14 centimetres square and 8.5 centimetres deep, this bowl is ideally sized for a desk, dressing table, or side table, where it can serve equally as a vide-poche, an ashtray, or simply as an object of contemplation. Its surface reward long and close attention — the iridescence reveals new colour shifts with each change of position or light source, making it a piece that never looks quite the same twice.

A beautiful and characterful example of mid-century iridescent glasswork, this bowl combines technical refinement with the kind of intimate, personal scale that gives small decorative objects their particular power.