Hazel Atlas made Fruits depression glass pattern from 1931 to 1935, in green with some pieces also in pink plus some clear and iridescent. Other glass companies made similar designs with fruit in the center and along the rim but we’ll focus here on Hazel Atlas’s product.
Oddly enough Fruits doesn’t seem to be either popular or well known despite the rather long production period. There are also not many pieces available. You can assemble a luncheon set or a beverage set but there is no dinner plate nor serving pieces other than a bowl and pitcher.
The 8 inch luncheon plate shown above is the only plate in this pattern, which is unusual for the era. Most patterns that include sherbets also have the small sherbet liner plates, the size we think of as a bread and butter plate.
Fruits includes a cup and a true saucer with cup ring.
The pattern is more distinct in person than in photos. Most pieces have more than one type of fruit – cherries, grapes, pears – although some may have only one type or clusters of multiple fruits together.
There is one small bowl, which Gene Florence mentions as very hard to find, yet it is available today on Replacements and considerably lower priced than Florence reports in his 2010 collector’s guide. (This is more evidence that pricing has varied greatly over the past 10-20 years. Published guides are just that, guides and do not set prices.)
The beverage items are interesting. There is one pitcher available in either green or crystal but not apparently in pink. You can choose 8 ounce flat tumblers in pink or green that have various fruits or those that have only pears. The small juice tumbler and larger iced tea are much harder to find and more costly.
You’ll notice the tumbler bottoms and centers of other pieces have fruits; even the sherbet foot has a design. The way to spot these as Fruits and not a different pattern like Cherry Blossom is that there are no flowers on Fruits and there is a fair amount of clear space between each fruit.
I wrote earlier about an iridescent tumbler we had that was shaped just like the Fruits tumblers but had a mix of fruit on the rim and base. I wasn’t sure it was from Hazel Atlas at the time. The crystal Fruits tumbler that Replacements shows has the identical fruit design.
Fruits is a pretty pattern with nice rounded shapes and some interesting pieces. Just looking now I found several pieces on eBay although I had to wade through a zillion other listings that had “fruits” in the title. I did not find all the pieces which suggests you may have to search for a while to get some of the harder-to-find, scarce pieces. That’s what makes collecting fun!