Antique Glass Bowls between £0 and £0
Open glass vessels for the table - finger bowls, fruit, sugar, preserve and punch bowls - sit alongside stemmed drinking glasses catalogued by the shape of their bowls.
What You're Looking At
Roughly half the listings are open vessels: finger bowls and rinsers, fruit, salad, sugar, preserve and centrepiece bowls, and moulded Art Deco bowls. The other large share is stemware, where "bowl" names the shape of the glass itself. Bucket, ogee, trumpet, bell, funnel, thistle, barrel and ovoid all turn up as bowl forms on wine, ale and champagne glasses.
Two poles dominate. Cut and etched clear glass of the 19th and early 20th centuries is the first: "cut" appears in 135 titles, with champagne bowls in 62 and finger bowls a recurring note, very often offered in pairs or sets. The second is Georgian and Victorian stemmed glass, carried by twists, rummers and bucket bowls, with Victorian and Georgian each labelling around 140 listings.
A third block is French opalescent moulded glass of the 1920s and 30s, milky and light-scattering, with opalescent in 83 titles. Coloured Victorian and Georgian glass makes up a similar share: cranberry, Bristol blue, amethyst, green, opaque and vaseline. Mottled Scottish art glass and Bohemian or Continental pieces form a smaller seam.
Dating runs 1750 to 1960 and the shape of it is bimodal, with an 18th-century cluster and a 20th-century one heavy in the 1920s and 30s. Only 455 of 819 listings carry a clean year. The rest are placed by reign or century, or by a dealer's own circa, c1830 and c1820 being the two most repeated.
Where The Range Widens
A name and a pattern do most of the work. The top of the range on Sellingantiques is held by named French opalescent models - Perruches, Calypso, Phalènes, Madagascar - and by pattern names and numbers such as Coquilles No1 to No5, Poissons, Ondines, Volubilis, Lys and Gui. The bottom is generic Victorian coloured pressed and moulded bowls, listed as nothing more than a cut glass bowl.
Completeness counts for as much. Pairs appear in 90 titles, and sampled sets run to six, eight, ten, twelve and sixteen matching bowls, some with plates, stands, covers or silver mounts. A single finger bowl or small sugar bowl sits far below the same thing multiplied by six.
On the Georgian side the interest is in the stem and the bowl form. Colour twists, mixed and incised twists, baluster and composite stems, Jacobite engraving and waisted or ribbed bucket bowls occupy the highest positions, while plain stems and plain bowls sit at the foot. Scale pulls the same way: "large" appears in 63 titles, and centrepieces, epergnes, punch bowls and turnover standing bowls run high.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for glass bowls between £0 and £0, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
The highest price of the last year on Sellingantiques went to a Georgian red colour twist wine glass with an ogee bowl, in September 2025.
The Antique Glass Bowls between £0 and £0 Glossary
- Finger bowl / rinser
- Small open bowl for rinsing fingers or glass rims at table. Finger appears in 54 titles, and rinsers are named separately.
- Champagne bowl
- The shallow, wide-bowled stemmed glass, also called a coupe. In 62 titles, usually offered as a pair or a set of four, six, eight, ten or twelve.
- Bucket bowl
- Straight-sided, flat-based bowl on rummers and wine glasses, in 49 titles. Often described as incurved or flared.
- Opaque twist / air twist
- Spiral white enamel or air threads worked into the stem. Opaque twist in 33 titles, air twist in 21, with single, double series, mixed, incised and colour twists alongside.
- Turnover rim
- A rim rolled outward, found on Irish standing bowls and sometimes paired with a lemon-squeezer base.
- Harlequin set
- A group matched in size but deliberately mismatched in pattern, used for sets of six champagne bowls.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are wine glasses listed as glass bowls?
Because the bowl is how the glass is catalogued. Georgian and Victorian stemware is identified by bowl shape, and 126 titles say wine while 62 say champagne bowls.
Bucket, ogee, trumpet, bell, thistle, barrel, ovoid, pan-top and hexagonal all appear as bowl forms in the archive.
What is the most repeated model in this category?
A French opalescent shell-moulded bowl in the Coquilles pattern. It appears in more than a dozen sampled listings, in sizes numbered 1 to 5.
That makes it the closest thing the category has to a standard item, against a field of one-offs.
How old are these bowls?
The dated field spans 1750 to 1960. The earliest sampled pieces include an incurved bucket bowl ale glass and a hexagonal jelly glass at c1750, and a cup-top port wine glass pushed back to c1740.
At the other end sit a punch bowl with cups and an opalescent centrepiece bowl at 1960. Between the two poles, Victorian material fills the middle.
Are Irish and Scottish pieces represented?
Both, in small numbers. Irish glass runs to 22 titles and shows up as turnover-rim standing bowls, Cork cut serving bowls and canoe bowls on lemon-squeezer bases.
Scotland is the smaller seam at 20 titles, almost all mottled Monart and Vasart art glass of the 1920s and 30s from one Perthshire tradition.
Do these come as sets or singles?
Both, and sets are common at the upper end. Pairs appear in 90 titles, and sampled groups run to six, eight, ten, twelve and sixteen matching bowls, sometimes with plates.
Singles are the norm lower down: one finger bowl, one sugar bowl, one small salt.
What colours turn up in Victorian glass bowls?
Blue leads with 50 titles, then green at 41, cranberry at 38 and opaque at 37. Amethyst and Bristol colours each account for around 18.
Vaseline and uranium glass, yellow-green and fluorescing under UV, recurs on both bowls and wine-glass bowls. Ruby appears too.