Carnival Glass Tumblers Gallery: Enamelled tumblers - Fenton

Enamelled Carnival Glass tumblers are thought to be some of the earliest Carnival, made mainly by Fenton and Northwood. They are different from other Carnival Glass in one significant way - the pattern is primarily created by the applied decoration, rather than by a press moulded design on the glass itself: although some enamelled tumblers do have moulded features, such as interior ribs or a horizontal grooved band (called a "Prism Band") they are secondary to the main pattern, the enamelled decoration.

The enamelled designs were hand-painted by decorators working from a template example, so it is not surprising that there is wide variation in appearance from one tumbler to another. As the pictures in the Gallery show very clearly, some designs are finely painted and some are more clumsily executed; some designs vary from the "standard" template and others have extra embellishments, or an element of the pattern is actually missing - see, for example, the three Magnolia and Drape tumblers below. It is very tempting to call many of them a "variant", but as they were all individually hand-decorated, much of the variation is down to the actual decorator, or maybe even whether it was painted at the start, or end of a shift, on a good day or on a bad one.

It is probably also fair to say that the names that have been given to some of the flower designs do not always follow what those flowers look like in real life!

* Note that Enamelled Cherries has also been referred to as Enamelled Cherries, and Little Flowers and Cherries and Blossoms - in our Gallery, we have called the Fenton version Enamelled Cherries and the Northwood version Enamelled Cherries and Little Flowers.

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