Opal ware from the C.F. Monroe Company, the American house that bought its creamy glass blanks from France and Mt. Washington and handed them to its own painters. This one wears a loose drift of chrysanthemums and daisies in mauve, white, and old rose across a serpentine pillow form, finished at the rim in beaded gilt brass with little rococo shells at the corners. The painting is soft and atmospheric, the way the best Victorian opal ware always is — flowers half-dissolved into the ground like something remembered rather than seen.
