Introduction
In the history of English decorative art, few pieces of legislation have had as immediate and dramatic an effect as the Glass Excise Act of 1745. Passed by Parliament in that year as part of a broader programme of wartime revenue-raising, the Act imposed a tax on glass by weight — a seemingly straightforward fiscal measure that transformed the economics of English glassmaking overnight and, in doing so, permanently altered the appearance of the English drinking glass.
The story of the 1745 Excise Act is the story of how external pressure — fiscal rather than aesthetic — can drive artistic innovation. The forms that emerged in response to the Act — the plain stem, the air twist, the opaque twist — were not the product of changing taste but of economic necessity. Understanding this is essential for any collector of 18th-century English glass, because it explains why the glasses of the post-1745 period look so different from those that preceded them, and why that difference is not a decline but a transformation.
The World Before the Act: Heavy Glass and the Baluster Tradition
To understand the impact of the 1745 Act, it is necessary to understand the world it disrupted. English glassmaking in the first half of the 18th century was built on lead crystal — the heavy, brilliant material developed by George Ravenscroft in the 1670s — and the dominant aesthetic of the period celebrated the weight and substance of that material.
The heavy baluster glasses of the 1685–1710 period, and the lighter balusters and balustroid stems of the following decades, were all forms that exploited the physical properties of lead crystal: its weight, its capacity to be worked in thick, solid sections, its brilliance in transmitted light. The knops and swellings of the baluster stem were possible precisely because lead crystal could be gathered in sufficient quantity to produce bold, substantial forms without losing its clarity.
This was expensive glass — expensive in materials, expensive in the skill required to produce it, and expensive to buy. But it was also glass of extraordinary quality, and the English lead crystal drinking glass of the early 18th century was recognised across Europe as among the finest glass being produced anywhere in the world.
The Act Itself: What It Said and What It Did
The Glass Excise Act of 1745 imposed a duty on glass calculated by weight — specifically, a duty per hundredweight on the raw materials used in glass production, effectively taxing the glass batch before it was even melted. The rate was set at a level that significantly increased the cost of producing heavy glass, and the incentive to reduce the weight of glass produced was therefore immediate and powerful.
For glassmakers working in the baluster tradition — producing thick, heavy glasses with substantial knops and solid stems — the Act was devastating. The cost of producing a heavy baluster glass increased sharply, and the price at which it could be sold to remain competitive became difficult to sustain. The economic logic of the heavy glass tradition was broken.
The Act was not the first attempt to tax English glass — there had been earlier excise duties in the late 17th century — but it was the most comprehensive and the most consequential. It remained in force, with various modifications, until 1845, when it was finally repealed — a full century during which the weight of glass was a direct determinant of its cost.
The Immediate Response: The Plain Stem
The response of English glassmakers to the 1745 Act was immediate and practical. If glass was taxed by weight, the solution was to make lighter glass. The plain stem — a simple, drawn stem of minimal cross-section, produced by drawing out the gather of glass to a thin rod rather than manipulating it into knops and swellings — became the dominant form almost overnight.
The plain stem glass is, in a sense, the anti-baluster: where the baluster celebrated mass and substance, the plain stem celebrated economy and lightness. It is a form stripped of ornament, reduced to its essential elements — bowl, stem, foot — with no decorative elaboration of the stem itself. Plain stem glasses of the immediate post-1745 period are often of considerable elegance — the simplicity of the form, well-proportioned and well-made, has its own quiet authority — but they represent a fundamental break with the decorative tradition of the preceding sixty years.
The Air Twist: Ingenuity in Response to Constraint
The plain stem solved the weight problem but created an aesthetic one: a glass with no stem decoration was a less interesting object than a baluster, and the market for decorative glass did not disappear simply because the economics of producing it had changed. The challenge for English glassmakers was to find a way of producing visual interest in the stem without adding weight.
The solution — the air twist — was one of the most ingenious responses to a fiscal constraint in the history of decorative art. By introducing air bubbles into the gather of glass and then drawing and twisting the gather, glassmakers could produce a stem of extraordinary visual complexity — spiralling columns of trapped air, twisting through the length of the stem in patterns of great delicacy and variety — without adding any taxable weight at all. The air itself was the decoration, and air was free.
The air twist stem appears in English glass from approximately 1745–1750, and it rapidly became one of the most popular and varied stem forms of the 18th century. The range of air twist configurations is considerable:
- Single series — a single spiral of air columns, the simplest and earliest form.
- Double series — two interlocking spirals, producing a more complex visual effect.
- Multiple spiral gauze — a fine, gauze-like network of very fine air columns, producing an almost lace-like effect in the stem.
- Mercurial twist — a particularly brilliant form in which the air columns are very fine and closely spaced, producing a bright, mercury-like appearance.
- Corkscrew — a broad, open spiral of a single large air column.
The air twist period — approximately 1745 to 1770 — produced some of the most beautiful and varied drinking glasses in the English tradition, and the finest examples are among the most sought-after objects in the collector's market today.
The Opaque Twist: A Further Development
From approximately 1755, a further development appeared alongside the air twist: the opaque twist, in which the air columns of the air twist were replaced by rods of white enamel glass — or, less commonly, coloured enamel — twisted through the stem in the same manner. The opaque twist produced a stem of great visual richness, the white enamel spirals contrasting brilliantly with the clear lead crystal of the surrounding glass.
The opaque twist was, if anything, even more varied in its configurations than the air twist, with single and double series, gauze twists, lace twists, and combinations of white and coloured enamel all represented. The coloured opaque twist — incorporating rods of blue, green, red, or yellow enamel alongside the white — is among the rarest and most desirable of all 18th-century English glass forms.
The opaque twist period overlapped with the air twist period from approximately 1755 to 1780, and the two forms were produced concurrently for much of this time. By approximately 1780, both had largely given way to the cut glass tradition that would dominate English glassmaking in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The Act and Irish Glass
One of the most significant indirect consequences of the 1745 Excise Act was its effect on the relative position of Irish glassmaking. Ireland was not subject to the English excise duty — Irish glass was produced free of the weight-based tax that constrained English production — and Irish glassmakers were therefore able to continue producing heavy, elaborately cut glass at a time when English producers were constrained to lighter forms.
This fiscal advantage, combined with the relaxation of restrictions on Irish glass exports in 1780, produced the great flowering of Irish cut glass in the late 18th and early 19th centuries — the Waterford, Cork, and Belfast glass that is now among the most collected of all Irish decorative art. The brilliant, heavily cut decanters and drinking glasses of the Irish tradition were made possible, in part, by the fiscal constraints that the 1745 Act imposed on their English competitors.
When the English excise was finally repealed in 1845, English glassmakers rapidly moved back toward heavier, more elaborately cut glass — but by then the Irish tradition had established itself as a distinct and celebrated form, and the two traditions had diverged sufficiently to be clearly distinguishable by the informed collector.
What the Act Means for Collectors
For the collector of 18th-century English glass, the 1745 Act is the single most important contextual fact to understand, because it explains the most fundamental division in the collecting field: the division between pre-1745 and post-1745 glass.
- Pre-1745 glass — heavy balusters, light balusters, balustroid stems, Silesian stems — is characterised by weight, substance, and the bold manipulation of lead crystal. It is rarer, generally more expensive, and represents the first great tradition of English lead glass design.
- Post-1745 glass — plain stems, air twists, opaque twists — is characterised by lightness, ingenuity, and the exploitation of visual interest through means other than mass. It is more varied, more widely available, and represents the second great tradition of English lead glass design.
Both traditions are of the highest quality and interest. The collector who understands the 1745 Act understands why they look different, and why that difference is not a matter of quality but of context — two distinct responses to the same extraordinary material, separated by a piece of fiscal legislation that changed everything.
The Wonder Room offers antique drinking glasses from both the pre- and post-1745 traditions. Browse our Georgian glass collection or explore further guides in Collector's Insights.