A cut Glass Hookah base with applied flowerheads, India, 18th century

the clear glass body of globular form with flattened base and flaring ridged neck, wheel-cut with central register of cusped cartouches enclosing a flowering plant palmette borders above and below, the shoulder and neck with alternating pearl and scrolling vine bands, the interior base with a floral bouquet of modelled flowers with white petals and yellow stamens

There are several comparable huqqa bases in major collections. One is in the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai (Moreshwar Gangadhar Dikshit: A History of Indian Glass, Bombay, 1969, p.88, pl.12a). Another is in the Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin (P.Pal et al; The Romance of the Taj Mahal, Los Angeles, 1989, p.151, no.160).  The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Joseph M. Dye III: The Arts of India, Virginia, 2001, p.434, no.207) also has one. The National Museum, Copenhagen (Kjeld von Folsach et al.(ed) Sultan, Shah and Great Mughal, Copenhagen, 1996, pp.365-6, no.350) has one that is known to have entered the Royal Danish Kunstkammer between 1765 and 1771. None of these examples have a comparable coloured glass central floral spray in the interior, as does the present piece.

A glass hookah base with a similar internal floral spray was sold in these rooms, 25 May 2005, lot 102.

Marilyn Jenkins discusses the influence of earlier European glass on such wares, 'with numerous eighteenth century documents recording the Persian penchant for Venetian-made hookah bases with lampwork (rods of glass worked into various forms over an open flame) fruits and flowers within them' (Jenkins 1986, p.50). When describing the Virginina piece, Dye makes the suggestion on the basis of a chemical analysis of the composition of the glass that the material itself was produced in England in the form of ingots, which were shipped to India to be worked into objects. Glass ingots of a similar chemical composition were discovered in the wreck of the Albion, a ship that sank in the English Channel in 1765, headed for India and China.