A rare Beilby enamelled opaque twist ale glass or mead flute, circa 1765-70
The tall round funnel bowl painted in white with a bee-skep or hive resting on a leaf scroll bracket, surrounded by bees in flight, a single flower on a stem with long slender leaves to the reverse, traces of gilding to the rim, the double-series stem with a pair of opaque white corkscrew threads encircled by a seventeen-ply spiral band, on a conical foot, 17.7cm high
Footnotes:
Provenance
W H P Leslie Collection
Henry Brown Collection, Sotheby's, 25 February 1947, lot 63
Sir Hugh and Lady Dawson Collection, Christie's, 14 June 1983, lot 99
With Maureen Thompson
Peter Meyer Collection, Bonhams, 1 May 2013, lot 66
Darell Thompson-Schwab Collection

Literature
Leslie Collection, private catalogue, p.37, no.229
W A Thorpe, History of English and Irish Glass (1929), pl.CXXXII, fig.1
G Bernard Hughes, English, Scottish and Irish Table Glass (1956), pl.130
L M Bickerton, Eighteenth Century English Drinking Glasses (1986), no.1108

Exhibited
Delomosne and Son, Gilding the Lily, 1978, no.64

A virtually identical glass, perhaps from the same original set, see the example in the Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. no.C.168-1925) illustrated by James Rush (1973), p.89, no.48a. A small number of other similar glasses enamelled with bee skeps are known, including one from the James Hall Collection with an elongated ogee bowl sold by Bonhams on 17 December 2008, lot 131 and now in Corning Museum of Glass (inv. no.2009.2.4), and another from the Kaplan Collection sold by Bonhams on 15 November 2017, lot 28 and illustrated by Martine Newby, Eighteenth Century English Glass from the Collection of Julius and Ann Kaplan (1998), p.16, no.11. See also the example from the Robert Lymbery Collection sold by Sotheby's on 11 May 1999, lot 19.