Glass-keep

Description

A late 17th century oak and fruitwood mural glass case; the chamfered rectangular top above a carved and moulded frame enclosing a single door; the door and flanking panels filled with a latticework of diamond-section spars above a carved base moulding; English, c.1680; top and backboards replaced; patch on underside., Peter Hewitt, PhD student at the Shakespeare Institute, in a blog for 'Shakespeare's World in 100 Objects' dates this glass case to 1620 saying 'Most surviving glass-keeps date to the 1680s, but this example, currently on display at Nash's House in Stratford-upon-Avon, was probably made in the 1620s. It has latticed windows, and little bunches of grapes carved along its edges. [...] Up until the 1670s, nearly all the glass in England was imported from the Low Countries or Venice, so the items displayed in this keep in the 1620s would have been cosmopolitan items; indicators of the owners taste and wealth. [...] Whilst the gentry had kept open house for entertaining throughout the sixteenth century, this piece of furniture reveals the habits of 'middling-sort' hosts in the 1620s. Here we see drinking practices that seem far removed from the communal and compulsory 'ales' of the sixteenth century parish.'