The 19th Century

The 19th century saw the presence of various styles, the Imperial style, Biedermeier, Revivals, Art Nouveau in the glass sector too, with varying fortune of the traditional European glassworks.

In the neo-classical and Imperial period, it was England, undamaged by devastating wars and social crises of that period and at its peak of economic power, which constituted a model for a life-style and furnishings of its elegant houses. The heavy, shiny English lead crystal, set off by round facets, was progressively made thicker and more complex thereby covering the whole surface of the object. In the rest of the European continent, table services which were homogenous in their form, decoration and dimensions, were spread in the continent in the 18th century, while in England they were adopted later to then become a normal product, often produced upon commission, from the beginning of the 19th century. From the Prince of Wales to all nobility and well-off members of the bourgeoisie, potential English purchasers received offers of precious ground crystals not only for the table but also for furnishing the house. The most extravagant services included various objects: chalices for different types of wine, glasses for water and beer, bowls, jugs and decanters. Ground facets went out of fashion around the end of the century but came back in the 1870s with the 'Brilliant style'. Lamps from around 1800, and especially from the Regency period, changed their style and were enriched with awnings of ground blobs of glass fixed to the centre and to an external metallic circle, which hid the light source.

The first half of the 19th century saw the application of new techniques in Great Britain: the 'cristallo-ceramie' decoration, acid etching, mould pressing and transfer printing.

'Cristallo-ceramie' consisted of inserting porcelain medallions in the wall of a crystal and was patented by the English Apsley Pellat in 1819. It had already been experimented in France in the last quarter of the 18th century by Barthélemy Desprez. It was also called 'sulphide' or 'cameo incrustation'. If this was a refined technique, the others were thought up as economic alternatives of more expensive works.

Acid etching was based on the corrosion of glass using a hydrofluoric-base mixture. By protecting the parts of the surface of the glass with a acid-resistant material, like wax, decorations could be obtained. Acid etching on glass had already been experimented in the 17th century but was commonly used from 1800 onwards and industrially around the end of the 19th century. High level objects were obtained using acid etching but also, later, quite cheap objects.

Like acid etching, mould pressing was also destined to imitate the most refined wheel engraved glass.
It was perfected with hand-actioned machines in Europe in the 1830s but even in the previous decade, it had been developed in the United States with very original results. Transfer printing was a serial surrogate for enamel painting on glass. A sheet of copper engraved with the desired decoration was wiped with ink containing metallic oxides. The decoration was transferred onto paper and then from this to the surface of the glass, which was then annealed. The first report of this technique used on glass was an application for a patent by John Brooks in London but it seems to have been developed in Liverpool. It enjoyed particular favour in the 19th century for low cost commemorative glass.

After the fall of Napoleon, with the establishment of the Biedermeier style, derived from the Imperial style but lighter and suitable for middle-class houses, Bohemian glassworks again triumphed. Unlike the past, Biedermeier Bohemian glass set off colour, the result of glass experimentation. The colours obtained were copper or gold ruby-red, cobalt blue, copper or chrome greens and unique yellows and fluorescent uranium greens, invented by the German Josef Riedl between 1830 and 1848. Coloured glass could also line an internal layer of crystal which rose to the surface thanks to cutting or engraving. Opaque white glass was also fashionable, often used to line crystal glasses and bottles with an intermediate layer of coloured transparent glass, which was visible in the contours of the grindings.
A surrogate for lining was staining (German Ätzung), obtained by covering the surface of the glass, which had previously been cooled, with a silver salt-based pigment to give an amber yellow colour and copper salts to give the colour red. Friedrich Egerman of Haida obtained yellow in 1820 and red in 1832. A similar effect was obtained using transparent enamels in delicate colours. Both staining and enamelling required annealing.

In the count Buquoy glassworks, situated in southern Bohemia, Hyalith glass was produced, which were opaque red or black, similar to hard rock, often painted gold, in 1819. Identical to stone were the Lithyalin, veined opaques, from Egerman, obtained cold with metallic oxides on a red base and then annealed, in 1828. Buquoy veined Agatines glass from 1835 were, on the other hand, opalescent pastels.

Crystals and coloured glass were mainly mould-blown, if needed stained or Lazuren, then ground or engraved or painted with enamel and gold or submitted to all of these decorative techniques. Engraving was the main technique and Dominik Bieman the most refined engraver, who had his own workshop from 1825 to his death. He painted a portrait of his illustrious clients on the walls of a glass or on crystal medallions. Engravers of various levels were active both in the production centres and in Prague or in the thermal spring locations, which boasted an international clientele. The easiest works, which were nevertheless still of the highest quality from a technical perspective, were the 'Badebecher', souvenir glasses for thermal spring use with landscapes and monuments from the area, symbols and inscriptions and often the name of the purchaser or the person who would receive the glass. Some engravers of exceptional skill had a predilection for complex figurative scenes. Mention should be made of August Böhm, artist of complex figurative scenes; ; Emanuel Hoffmann, Anton F. Pelikan and Anton Heinrich Pfeiffer, painters of portraits, chivalrous scenes and hunting scenes. Hoffmann, Pfeiffer and especially Karl Pfohl wheel engraved reproductions of famous renaissance paintings, often Raffaello's.

Before and after the end of the Napoleonic Empire, highly refined paintings with transparent enamels were produced in Germany and Austria on simple cylindrical glasses or conical trunked ones, sometimes with an outsplayed and reeded base, called 'Ranftbecher' in this case. The German Samel Mohn in Leipzig and Dresden stood out in this decorative style up to 1815, as did his son Samuel Gottlob Mohn in Dresden and Vienna up to 1825 and his Viennese collaborator Anton Kothgasser from about 1813 to 1820.

The fashion for elegant table services established itself everywhere. The demand for crystal stimulated the production of important glassworks in France, Belgium, the Scandinavian countries and Russia. Saint-Louis, Baccarat and Clichy stood out in France. The Cristalleries in Saint-Louis, founded in Lorraine in 1767, at first had produced lead crystal in France. From the 1820s they also made coloured or painted crystals, from the 1840s delicate opalines and millefiori glass, especially paperweights. The Compagnie des Cristalleries de Baccarat in Lorraine, founded in 1764, made neo-classical forms up to the 1830s, then extraordinary crystals and lined crystals of coloured crystal, ground and engraved, in the Bohemian style, enamelled glass, opalines, millefiori paperweights and 'sulphides'. The Cristallerie de Clichy has a similar varied production: founded in Pont-de-Sèvres in 1833 and moved to Clichy near Paris, it became famous particularly due to the quality of its colours.
In Belgium, the Cristalleries du Val-Saint Lambert, founded in Liege in 1825, produced, at first, English-type crystals to then move on to the Bohemian and French style.

Bohemian engravers emigrated to Great Britain too, where the fashion for lined crystal became established with one or more coloured layers, ground and engraved, and of opaline glass. In the United States, glass produced in Bohemia was imported upon commission but probably as early as the middle of the 19th century, European artisans emigrated to Pittsburgh, Boston, Philadelphia and New York to start up similar production.

Even the Imperial Glassworks in St Petersburg moved on from engraved crystal in the English mould from the neo-classical and Imperial period to vivaciously coloured glass in the Bohemian style, engraved, ground and enamel-painted. It also produced delicate opalines of French inspiration. At the beginning of the 19th century, it established itself for its sumptuous coloured glass furniture with structures in gilt bronze, in the Imperial style. Even Scandinavia, especially Sweden, felt the Bohemian influence.
Only Venice was divorced from this Bohemian trend, since its glassworks were in a pitiful state and were not able to deal with technical innovation, but especially because the Austrian domination in Veneto discouraged local industry, which aimed to bring in products from those countries traditionally tied to the Habsburg dynasty, like Bohemia and Silesia in the glassworks sector.

In the first half of the 19th century, the Murano glassworks survived only thanks to the production of glass beads and pearls obtained by cutting a thin holed rod, to be sent to the colonies. Of lesser economic relevance was the production of habitual use glass and, in the artistic field, the production of flame pearls, and, as far back as the Napoleonic era, of polychromatic tessere for precious inlays of furniture. This work was successful even in the second half of the century.
Some half-hearted signs of a recovery of the Venetian glassworks style were seen in the 1830s, when ancient Venetian and glass and foreign glassworks collecting began, especially French and Bohemian: the Venetian ones, first of all that of Gioacomo Bussolin and then that of Pietro Bigaglia and Lorenzo Graziati, attempted to produce modern products decorated with millefiori and filigrees. In 1845, Bigaglia produced the Ossidiane, coloured small-spot opaque glass, and in 1856 Lorenzo Radi recovered the technique of fusion of chalcedony and even earlier aventurin had been recovered. Radi had shown considerable determinacy in the study and experimentation of ancient formulas for coloured mosaic tessere, used for new works but also to restore ancient mosaics, like those in the San Marco Basilica.

In 1854, the Fratelli Toso glassworks were founded, which from the initial production of habitual use glass soon shifted to the production of blown objects decorated in the ancient Venetian style. In 1859, Antonio Salviati founded a mosaic art workshop, which drew international attention to Murano. In 1866, he then founded the Salviati & C. glassworks (from 1872 Venice and Murano Glass and Mosaic Company) which promoted Venetian glassworks everywhere with the high artisan quality of its products, based on ancient Venetian techniques but also on archaeological ones which were increasingly been recovered. A significant contribution to the Venetian glassworks resurgence was the creation of the Glassworks Museum in Murano in 1861 and a drawing school for glassworkers attached to it, in 1862. The Murano glassworks were enriched by a range of exceptional chromatics, with a predilection for brilliant colours and aventurin, and the glassworkers reached the peak of their hot-working abilities in the last quarter of the 19th century. Amongst the Murano glassworks families, in addition to the Tosos, others who distinguished themselves were the Barovier, Ferro and Seguso families, while Vincenzo Moretti from the Compagnia di Venezia in Murano should take the merit for the rediscovery of the Roman murrina technique or glass-mosaic with works imitating the ancient ones, exhibited at the World Trade Fair in Paris in 1878. In 1877 Salviati left the Compagnia and founded the Salviati dott. Antonio glassworks, which produced murrine and blown objects in the Venetian style with the collaboration of the Baroviers, who took over the company in 1883. This glassworks, which only in 1896 was called Artisti Barovier, distinguished itself between the end of the 19th century and the first world war for its more refined Venetian products. Amongst the workshop decorative techniques recovered in Murano in the second half of the 19th century, mention should be made of enamelled painting, wheeled engraving and cameo engraving. A promotion event for the new Venetian glass was the production of Islamic enamelled and gilt lamps for the viceroy of Egypt.

Around the end of the century, while the French Art Nouveau was taking off, which was a very original development of Orientalism and Japonisme, glass from Murano did not change its style except for the insertion of dragons of an oriental nature in the chalice stems.
Murrine, or mosaic glass, glass with gilt base which are copies of original early-Christian ones, imitations of late-Christian matrix glass, hot worked instead of ground, the 'Corinto' vases shaped like Greek ceramics and cameo glass, were produced from 1878 and were the consequence of the archaeological style which triumphed in the 1870s.

Cameo glass was the merit of glassworkers and engravers from Stourbridge, who had worked hard at imitating the famous Portland vase, exhibited at the British Museum, which had already been copied in ceramic by Josiah Wedgewood in 1789, when it still belonged to the Duke of Portland. The myth of the Portland vase became an obsession for the English engravers up until the production of the copy by John Northwood in the Red House Glassworks in Stourbridge in 1876. From then an English production category was inaugurated which lasted until about 1920. The complex wheel and acid engravings on crystal were also in the archaeological and neo-renaissance style. From 1861 Northwood brought innovations to this technique, in which the company Stevers Williams distinguished itself before 1950.
Starting with the world trade fair in Philadelphia in 1876, the 'Brilliant style' triumphed, characterised by sparkling diamond cuts, in Great Britain, France and even in America. In France it was Baccarat that produced the more sumptuous works, including furniture and crystal fountains.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, national styles were favoured: English cut and engraved crystals and French crystals, the Bohemian ones and Venetian glass, especially the hot-worked ones. The Bohemian tradition of engraved crystal was revitalised by Ludwig Lobmeyr's prestigious Viennese company, which commissioned the Bohemia chalices, vases and plates with rich engraved compositions in the neo-renaissance style. In Russia, in the Imperial Glassworks which influenced other glassworks, glass richly decorated with enamel was produced, with historicising patterns in a typically Russian interpretation.
While Venice remained faithful to historicism up to and after the end of the 19th century, in the 1880s Art Nouveau developed in other countries, especially France, which shook the decorative art world.