Who made the first glass flowers?
Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf, Bohemian glassworkers who worked from Dresden. They began with glass models of sea creatures for museums in the 1860s, then turned to plants. Their botanical models for Harvard, made between 1887 and 1936, are the best-known glass flowers in the world.
Leopold (1822–1895) was a glassworker who had made costume jewellery and glass eyes. In 1863 he made glass sea anemones for a Dresden museum, working from colour plates because the living animals decay too quickly to study. Rudolf (1857–1939) joined him and later did most of the botanical work. Their studio was at Hosterwitz, just outside Dresden.
How did Harvard come to commission them?
George Lincoln Goodale, a Harvard botany professor, saw the Blaschkas’ marine models and travelled to Dresden in 1886 to propose glass plants for the university’s new Botanical Museum. The first shipment arrived damaged. Mary Lee Ware and her mother, Elizabeth, then agreed to pay for the whole collection.
By 1890 a contract limited the Blaschkas to botanical work for Harvard alone, renewed every ten years. Production ran from 1887 to 1936. The collection is known as the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants and is dedicated to Charles Eliot Ware, Elizabeth’s husband and Mary Lee’s father.
How many glass flowers did the Blaschkas make for Harvard?
Harvard’s own figures put the total near 4,300 models of about 780 plant species. A breakdown by type gives 847 life-size models plus about 3,000 detail models of plant parts. Counts differ by a few hundred between sources, depending on whether detail models and fungal studies are included.
The most careful reading is a range: roughly 4,000 to 4,400 models, covering about 780 to 830 species and varieties, in 164 families for the life-size set. Treat any single number you meet, including ours, as one of several defensible totals.
How were the glass flowers made?
By lampworking: glass rod softened in a flame fed by a foot-powered bellows, then pulled, bent and joined by hand. Wire supported the thin parts, and colour came from enamel and paint fused or applied to the glass. The methods were common in the period. The Blaschkas’ skill and fidelity to living plants were not.
Rudolf later made his own glass and colorants. The models combine glass, wire, glue, organic materials and paint or enamel, and were described at the time as hand-worked, coloured and painted glass. A 1993 conservation study in the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation looked at how those mixed materials have held up.
Where can you see them today?
The Ware Collection is on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a gallery that reopened in 2016. The Corning Museum of Glass in New York holds the Blaschka archives in the Rakow Research Library, which serves scholars of glass.
Both are worth the visit. A photograph flattens exactly what the models were made to show, which is depth.
What does Pontil & Pistil take from the Blaschkas, and what do we change?
We take the craft: flame, rod, wire and enamel, by hand. We change the reference. Where the Blaschkas worked from living plants and drawings, we scan one bloom at the moment it opens and build to the file, so a model is of a particular flower and not a typical one.
See the anatomy of the lily on the stage for what that looks like part by part, or the cabinet for what is on the bench now.
Sources
- Glass Flowers, Wikipedia — model counts, technique and dates of production, citing Harvard figures.
- Rudolf Blaschka, Linda Hall Library — the 1863 sea anemones, the 1886 commission and the 1890 exclusive contract.
- Glass Flowers, Harvard Museum of Natural History — the collection’s own account, including its figure of about 4,300 models.
- Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 1993, vol. 32, no. 3 — a conservation study of the glass models’ materials.