Mary Gregory Glass

Mary Gregory glass, variety of glass produced in the United States toward the end of the 19th century in imitation of the then popular English cameo glass. It was named for Mary Gregory, an employee in the decorating department of the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company in Sandwich, Mass. Both transparent and coloured, the glass was decorated with white enamel designs that were painted on the surface instead of being carved, as the genuine cameo glass was. Such cheap copying of the real cameo glass eventually ruined the market for both the genuine and the copies alike, since the greatest part of the English genuine cameo glass produced in the 1880s was exported to the United States.