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Antique HandPressedGlass European GoldFiligreeCapped Beaded Heavy Necklace

About the Item

This antique rare hand-pressed-glass necklace features semi-translucent grape-green large beads that are capped with gilt-brass filigree. Based on the combination of bead seams, spring-ring clasp, and metal findings on the unmarked faux Chinese-jade necklace, it dates to the late Victorian period most likely from Western Europe. Around WWI, hand presses, which stamped molten glass into a mold to create a bead with a hole and a seam, were often used to produce costume jewelry as a cottage industry in Germany and the Czech region. This was while there was a lack of factory machine presses and finishing tumblers that used sand to polish out the seam lines. Another reason that the cloudy green beads can be identified as atypically hand-pressed is that they are more opaque and therefore harder and less prone to breaking during formation than fully-translucent glass, which was better suited for automated-machine pressing. Also the green beads are an unusual swirled color including white, which suggests that their production was more limited than machine-pressing would enable. Without the bead-seams, this necklace could be mistaken for one by Coco Chanel. Her 1920s couture pieces that popularized costume jewelry often included labor-intensive Parisian-lampwork beads, which required a highly-skilled glassmaker to make by hand so that each was unique, such as featuring white swirls. In comparison, while hand-pressing glass was still a very time-consuming process, the resulting beads were instead uniform in shape and size. The antique necklace, with tiny brass spacers between the glass beads, was strung with white silk, which remains in very good condition.

Metal:

Gold,Brass,Gilt Metal

Weight:

99 g

Dimensions:

Width: 0.75 in (19.05 mm)Diameter: 9.5 in (241.3 mm)Length: 29 in (736.6 mm)

Style:

Late Victorian

Place of Origin:

Germany

Period:

Early 20th Century