Tear wine glass ca. 1899 Attributed to Harry Powell British This object is a very fine example of the series of "tear" vessels designed by Harry Powell (grandson of the wine-merchant, James Powell, who had purchased the Whitefriars Glassworks in 1834) at the very end of the nineteenth century. This group of Powells designs shows him moving beyond his wavy-rimmed, organic, art nouveau responses to Façon-de-Venise glass. Instead, the inspiration for this group of crisp tableware, simply decorated with elongated vertical sea-green applied trails, or tears, was the great fifteenth-century Netherlandish painted masterpiece by Hugo van der Goes, the Portinari Triptych (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi); in one of his design notebooks, logging "Glasses with Histories" and made around 1912 onwards (preserved in the Museum of London, acc. 3252), Powell sketched the vase in the paintings foreground, identifying it as "flower pictures by Hugo vander Goes in Uffizi Galery". The page of this noteb