Between the wars the glass towns of Bohemia ran on a division of labour. Glasshouses blew the blanks, and decorating ateliers painted them. This decanter is that trade in miniature. The blank is textbook interwar spirit-decanter form, a tapered cylinder with a stepped shoulder and a flat button stopper, and the atelier gave it pure Deco geometry, fired cobalt bands at the collar and foot and a fine white enamel trellis netted around the body, all applied by hand and never signed, because this work almost never was.

What it carries instead of a signature is a pairing number, 114, scratched with a diamond point into the hand-ground stopper and again under the base, the workshop's way of keeping a fitted stopper with its own bottle. Ninety-odd years on, the pair are still together. A small chip to the mouth rim is named plainly and part of its record now, tucked below the lip and largely hidden unless you look straight down into it, nothing structural.