When a beautifully colored Chinese porcelain vase was sold by Mrs. Mary Morgan for $18,000 in 1886, the price achieved at auction made headlines in the United States. A number of glass companies took note and began to copy the color. Hobbs, Brockunier & Co. was one of the most successful firms to do so. It simply changed the glass that it was already marketing as “Coral Ware” and began to sell it as “Peachblow,” which was what the Chinese were thought to have called their shaded porcelain. Hobbs’s Coral Ware was blown in two layers, a heat-sensitive gold ruby outer layer and an opaque white inner layer, so it does resemble porcelain that shades from deep red to pale amber. This glass continued to be produced for five or six years, until the company closed. The Museum has several smaller pieces in this color, but this newly acquired lamp is quite striking. Because of the opacity of the white glass, it is unlikely that very much light would have come from the kerosene burner inside the shade, but the lamp was undoubtedly beautiful when it was illuminated, and it would have looked very impressive in the parlor. The Hobbs company, which was in operation from 1845 until 1891, made Art Glasses, but it also produced pressed glass patterns and employed cutters and engravers. The firm was started by John L. Hobbs and James B. Barnes, who had worked for the New England Glass Company. William Leighton, a member of the family that supervised the New England company, joined the Wheeling firm in 1863. It is therefore not surprising that the Art Glasses of the two companies were sometimes similar. The production of glasshouses in Wheeling, West Virginia, is discussed in detail in Gerald I. Reilly, ed., Wheeling Glass, 1829–1939: Collection of the Oglebay Institute Glass Museum, Wheeling: the institute, 1994. For more on Hobbs’s peachblow glass, see Kenneth M. Wilson, Mt. Washington and Pairpoint Glass, v. 1, Woodbridge, U.K.: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2005, pp. 246–249