Fostoria Versailles Etched Blue Elegant Glass Footed Water Tumbler
Here is another piece of Fostoria’s Versailles etched elegant glass. This design is pretty in pink but comes to life in this wonderful azure blue. The color is soft but sparkles with life and is perfectly offset by the crystal foot and short stem.
Fostoria made Versailles blue from 1928 to 1940, one of their longer patterns, and it is etched on the Fairfax blank. You may be familiar with Fairfax plates or bowls, where it has soft angles and optics. The stemware has a subtle vertical panel optic and the stem itself is facetted with a small knob near the top and six petals that clasp the bowl of the goblet or tumbler. This footed tumbler’s stem is too short for the knob but you can see the six little petals in the photo.
I just listed this tumbler, the bouillon cup and the saucer for under the bouillon cup. A bouillon cup is a little larger than a coffee cup and has two handles. It was meant for clear soups eaten at the first course of a formal dinner.
One thing that is so charming about vintage glass is how it silently speaks to a different way of life. Today we don’t often serve soups as a first course – most of our family meals are served as one or possibly two courses counting dessert – and we aren’t likely to have special dishes just for a certain type of soup. It’s fascinating to start collecting older glass and realize the number of specialized pieces people used to use. Some make a lot of sense today, such as putting a small plate under a dish of ice cream. What puzzles me is that many people had small kitchens and I wonder where they stored their glass and fine china. They must have had shelves in their dining room or pantry.