PROBABLY NORTH EAST IRAN, 8TH-9TH CENTURY

This intact glass bottle is of a shape that appears to have flourished during the early medieval period, surviving in popularity as the form for a rose-water sprinkler for a generation or two. The form is found in a variety of glass working techniques, as well as in metal and glazed pottery. For an example of a rosewater sprinkler in metal see a bottle in the National Museum, formerly Iran Bastan Museum, in Tehran, published in A.S.Melikian-Chirvani, Islamic Metalwork from the Iranian World. 8-18th Centuries, London, 1982, fig.12, p.36). It is unclear however as to whether it was the metalworkers inspiring the glassmakers or vice versa. Writing on a very similar glass bottle in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marilyn Jenkins comments that the faceted bottles with horizontal bands find especially close parallels with metal (Marilyn Jenkins, 'Islamic Glass, a Brief History', Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Glass, Fall 1986, no.32, p. 31). Another similar bottle to ours is in the Corning Museum of Glass (David Whitehouse, Islamic Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass, Vol. I, New York, 2010, no.274, p.166).

All three bottles mentioned above have the design found here of 'empty arches', with a second smaller tier of arches above. Ours, like the Corning bottle have an added level of sophistication in that they have small triangles formed in the upper spaces between the arches, like stylized capitals surmounting the slender columns. A similar bottle, worked in blue glass, was sold in these Rooms, 15 October 2002, lot 81. The bottle offered here has moulding that is distinctly more precise than all of the other examples discussed above, and retains the original surface almost throughout.