Message #50083

[forestman]

Hi Rube and Richard,

Lovely bottles, thanks for posting them.

It's been asked before why these bottles have the yellow lines down the side and I was wondering how Steven's bottles had been worked, the Treasury books I bought are earning their money because these bottles were mould blown so the yellow lines on the sides are where the moulding lines where polished out reaching the deeper set yellow layer.

The moulds were uneven and had something like dimples in their surface so when the bottle was polished flat it went through the layers in places to reveal the different colours.

There was a time, both in the true snuff bottle period and in the 1970's when Realgar bottles were dismissed as they were considered common and had little value. In the 1970's Hugh Moss was in an exporting warehouse in China where there were  Realgar bottles piled together with no protection in crates and a warehouse worker was seen stirring them with his hand with no respect for them. Red overlay bottles were viewed the same way as they were so common, no matter how high the quality of the bottle.

Regards, Adrian.