Blaschka - The Glass Aquarium

Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka - 19th Century glass models of natural history

Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka and natural history in the 19th Century
By Chris Meechan, National Museum & Gallery, Cardiff and Dr Henri Reiling, University of Utrecht.

The second half of the 19th century was a time of great scientific discovery. New museums were being built throughout the world and many existing private museums were opening to the public. New galleries were designed to display the expanding array of known living plants and animals. For many groups of animals this was easily done: birds, mammals, reptiles and even fish could be skinned and mounted to produce reasonably accurate and lifelike presentations. Insects with their hard exoskeletons could simply be dried and then pinned to boards for study.

But what about soft bodied animals such as jellyfish and sea anemones? Examples of these animals could be pickled in spirit to preserve them, but this in no way reflected their extraordinary appearance in life. Their colours quickly faded and their shapes became distorted as the tissues shrank. Papier-mâché and wax models could not capture their translucence and transparency. Leopold Blaschka, a brilliant glassworker and amateur naturalist, devised a solution to this problem - vividly recreating these life forms modelling them in glass.

Leopold Blaschka came from a long line of glass workers. As far back as the 15th century a Blaschka was registered in Prague as an artificer in decorative glass. For a time the family lived in northern Austria and then Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic, where Leopold's grandfather owned a sawmill and a glass furnace. His second son Joseph, Leopold's father, moved to Aicha in northern Bohemia, and it was there that Leopold was born on 27th May1822, the youngest of three sons.

Leopold showed an early aptitude for painting and it was suggested that he should study art in Vienna and Italy. However, his father wanted him to undergo a more practical training. He was therefore apprenticed for a year in a merchant's store before joining his brother for instruction in working with precious metals and cutting gemstones. Some years later he began working with his father to learn the traditional family metal and glass working skills.

Leopold was married in 1846 to the daughter of a local mill owner, but his wife died during a cholera epidemic four years into the marriage. Depressed and in poor health Leopold led a reclusive existence until encouraged by a local doctor who owned a substantial library of natural history books, he began to study and to paint plant life. Gradually he recovered his health, but following the death of his father in 1852 he felt the need to get away and in early 1853 he left for America. During the voyage his ship was becalmed for two weeks, allowing Leopold time to trawl for and make drawings of jellyfish. This was his first opportunity to study from life creatures he had previously only known from illustrations and which went on to play such an important role in his future career.

On reaching America he remained for some months in New York where he entered into business supplying goods to a number of wholesale jewellery firms. He returned home to Aicha in the winter of the same year. In 1854 he married Carolina Riegel and established a glass workshop in his father-in-law's house, where his position as supervisor of several workmen allowed him plenty of time to pursue his botanical studies.

Leopold's son Rudolf was born on 17th June 1857. It was around this time that Leopold began experimenting with making artificial flowers in glass - principally as an exercise to demonstrate his skill. He is unlikely to have realised that these models would eventually lead to a life dedicated to natural history.

His first botanical creations were based on the orchids in the greenhouses of Prince Camille de Rohan, an enthusiast connoisseur and collector of plants. On his estate at Sychrov Castle, Bohemia, the Prince had laid out a world famous garden, reflecting the 19th century fascination with botany, then a science offering constant new discoveries.

Between 1860 and 1862 Leopold constructed a series of some 100 models representing nearly fifty species of these exotic specimens - principally as an exercise to demonstrate his craftsmanship. The Prince introduced Leopold to Professor Ludwig Reichenbach, the Director of the Royal Natural History Museum and Botanical Garden in Dresden, and as a result he was invited to display the orchid models in the pavilion of the Botanical Garden in the summer of 1863. Although they aroused little commercial interest.

As a result of the exhibition, however, an Englishman living in Dresden suggested to Leopold that he make a set of models of sea anemones in glass as these creatures were so difficult to preserve. For reference he lent a copy of 'Actinolgia Britannica: A history of British Sea Anemones and Corals' which had recently been published by the influential naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse. The Illustrations in this book were to provide the principle source material for the early marine models.

It was Gosse who inspired the British craze for aquaria which began around the middle of the 19th century when cheap plate glass first became available. This, combined with the discovery that animals could be kept alive in water oxygenated by seaweed, led to the introduction of aquaria into many of the fashionable drawing rooms. The seawater aquarium was first mentioned in Gosse's 'A Naturalist's Wanders on the Devonshire Coast' - another important source book for Leopold. Much later, inspired by Gosse's idea the Blaschkas were to install an aquarium in their own studio.

Professor Reichenbach subsequently purchased the set of anemone models for the Dresden Museum. Exhibited in artificial aquaria they came to the attention of curators from other natural history museums across Europe. Leopold began supplying sets of anemones to such museums as well as to a growing number of private collectors.

The first set of models comprised sixty-eight sea anemones mounted on plaster bases painted to resemble rock. After this, Leopold expanded his catalogue with the majority of models consisting of three -dimensional glass interpretations of zoological illustrations. Little commercial or scientific interest seems to have been shown in the early models. This is borne out by the fact that anatomical error in their designs were not corrected for some time after they were first publicised in the catalogue. For instance, a model that represented a single tentacle was offered as a model of a complete anemone. Other anemones were presented as almost flat discs showing the mouth only, which faithfully reflected the original illustrations. Because these had been drawn from above, the body that supported the mouth was not visible - and so it had been omitted from the models.

Such mistakes demonstrate the innate difficulty of copying from two dimensional source material, however accurate that material might be. A picture emerges of Leopold studying on his own, painstakingly recreating biological illustrations, but without direct contact with the naturalists who had first-hand experience of the creatures he was modelling.

The initial anemone models came to be supplemented by rather less decorative creatures - such as worms, echinoderms, molluscs and jellyfish. In the preface to Leopold's early catalogue of 1871 (which offered 300 different models) Reichesnbach recommended the glass models as being very true to nature. Reichenbach also influenced the Blaschkas selection of subjects. From a letter by Rudolf Blaschka to the director of the Botanical Museum of the Harvard University, we know that Reichenbach occasionally brought along snails that he has found on his excursions and asked to have models made of them for the museum. On another occasion he referred to figures in an old book "from the former century" (i.e. the 18th) and ordered models of the animals depicted.

To begin with the business did not pay well, perhaps due to the low pricing of the models. Assisted by Rudolf, Leopold was obliged to concentrate on other sources of income, producing decorative items of jewellery, such as brooches, fans and earrings. The Blaschkas also made and sold glass eyes - mostly for cosmetic use by the blind but also for taxidermists. This enterprise resulted by chance after Leopold had heard people complaining about the fragility of artificial eyes made in Paris. He prepared some eyes from solid 'glass-mass', which, though they were never advertised, became widely sought after. Despite the fact that neither of them took any pleasure modelling the eyes, the Blaschkas' workshop carried a large stock and it was not until they moved out of Dresden to nearby Hosterwitz in 1887 they ceased to make them.

From 1866 onwards the business received modest orders for models each year. In 1876 an order for two complete collections of modelled from the South Kensington Museum, London (now the Natural History Museum) provided a significant boost. It helped inspire Leopold's son, Rudolf, to further his studies in zoology and anatomy and to immerse himself in the great natural history library of the Imperial Academy Leopodina in Dresden. Here both farther and son studied illustrated books and copied many of the drawings as sources of reference for the glass animals. Hundreds of their reference drawing survive and are today housed in the Rakow Library at the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York.

In 1876, at the age of nineteen, Rudolf Blaschka joined his father full-time in the glassworkers studio. This fresh blood seemed to revive and add new flair to the business. In 1877 contact was made with professor Ernst Haeckel, a prominent zoologist at the University of Jena. Professor Haeckel lent the Blaschkas books from his library so that they could copy the illustrations. The Blaschkas maintained an important professional friendship with him and it is likely that they visited each other.

Haeckel had a highly productive scientific career. He created more than 2,000 genus names and described more than 3,500 species. He was also open to new ideas, applying Charles Darwin's theory of evolution (published in 1859) to the science of systematics as early as 1862. He believed that a species' embryonic development reflected its evolutionary development. This law elaborated on ideas about embryonic development first explored in Germany as part of the 19th century trend in biological thinking known as 'Naturphilosophie'. Naturphilisophie opposed the rationalism of the Enlightenment and saw the universe as a dynamic, developing organism rather than as a regulated machine. It sought harmonies and parallels in nature and simulated research into embryology and comparative morphology.

Several of Haeckel's publications were used as preparatory material by the Blaschkas. Typical features of the illustrations, such as symmetry and undulating shapes, are reflected in their models. This could be interpreted as a parallel development, but it is likely that the Blaschkas were directly influenced. Haeckel's commitment to the decorative arts culminated in the publication of his 'Kunstsformen der Natur' [Artforms in Nature] (1899 -1904), a work considered to have influenced the development of the decorative style based on organic forms known as 'Jugendstil', the German version of Art Nouveau.

In 1877, the year that the Blaschkas made contact with Haeckel, Leopold ordered two shipments of specimens so that he could compare them with his own preparatory drawings, carefully copied from zoological illustrations. This is the earliest known example of the Blaschkas actually seeing the animals that they portrayed in glass (albeit in a preserved state). The zoological station at Naples was the first marine research station in the world. It was founded in the early 1870s by Anton Dohrn, one of Haeckel's students and became a magnet for naturalists throughout Europe who were eager to see living specimens of the extraordinary marine life forms that were being discovered.

Leopold intended to publish a new catalogue of the studio's models. This probably appeared in 1878, but no copy survives. What has survived is the North American sales catalogue from that year. Leopold wrote to Haeckel that the new catalogue was intended to be scientific. An analysis of the collection on offer suggests that the majority of models were still based on pubished zoological illustrations.

However, within this framework, new themes can be noted. For the first time series of models were offered which represented stages of embryonic development rather than just the adult life form. Possibly these were inspired by the ideas explored in Haeckel's 'Biogenetic Law'. In addition, anatomical models of different animal groups were offered for sale, reflecting the contemporary enthusiasm for comparative morphology.

The Blaschkas' later glass models were intended to function as scientific exhibits and teaching aids rather than as decorative items. The printed materials on which they were based were considered to be scientifically authoritative. Therefore only by closely replicating this source could the glass models themselves be considered scientifically valid.

Observations on real and living animals increased the accuracy of the later models. In 1879 Rudolf went on a field trip to northern Italy, and the Adriatic and it was around this time that seawater aquaria were installed in the Blaschkas' Dresden studio. To stock them, living marine animals were supplied by the zoolo9gical station at Trieste, Italy, and also by the British trader R.T. Smith of Weymouth.

Only a small proportion of the modelled species, less than an estimated ten percent, can be assumed to have resulted from actual contact with the animals. Yet such contact must have had an important influence on the Blaschkas' development as model makers, offering an opportunity for close examination, deepening their understanding of morphology and leading to better representations of the animal body in glass.

Nineteenth-century scientists showed an almost insatiable desire to discover and describe the natural world. Colonialism in particular had opened up entire continents for exploration and study. The findings of these numerous scientific expeditions were published with descriptions and illustrations of newly discovered animal and plant species. The Blaschkas made use of these reports when seeking ideas for new additions to their catalogue. With such inclusions their collections began to acquire an exotic aspect. Descriptions of molluscs and echinoderms from the archipelago of the Philippines; coral animals from the Red Sea; molluscs from Polynesia, and siphonophores from Lanzarote were all eagerly copied as valuable source material.

The voyage of the British ship 'Challenger', the first worldwide oceanographic expedition, was particularly widely reported. Samples of animals found during the expedition were sent to specialists everwhere to analyse and describe. The voyage of the 'Challenger' left its traces in the Blaschkas' oeuvre as well - in their remarkably complex glass models of sponges found by the expedition.

The models were commissioned by Professor Franz Eilhard Schulze of Berlin, in 1885, and were based on illustrations of Schulze's research and his own microscopic slides. Schulze himself made suggestions for improvements to the models and Leopold subsequently made the required alterations. This co-operation continued with the production of models showing enlargements of sections of sponge tissue and spiculae.

The 'Challenger' models were completed in 1886 an Schulze was immensely proud of them. Prior to this the Blaschkas had kept in touch with science primarily through printed materials, so this direct contact with an experienced naturalist and the opportunity to incorporate feedback from Schulze into their work marked a new stage in their scientific model-making career.

Comparison between early and later models by the Blaschkas reveals a tendency towards increased scientific accuracy and away from the more showy style of the 'decorations for elegant rooms'. As their models were described in the first catalogues. The Blaschkas were keen to accommodate customer demands for the glass models of sea animals and continued to expand their range accordingly. By 1888 the catalogue published by Henry Ward, their agent in the United States, listed 700 models.

The models varied greatly in complexity and in their method of construction. Component parts were formed from both clear and coloured glass using a combination of glass-blowing and lamp-working techniques. The parts were then either directly fused together or assembled with adhesives - probably animal glues. Where necessary other material were used in the construction. Fine copper wires were added to reinforce or attach delicate tentacles and gills and painted paper was cleverly incorporated to represent internal structures.

Ingeniously, the Blaschkas also made use of the actual shells of terrestrial, freshwater and marine gastropods and introduced a series in which modelled glass bodies were attached to the shells of bivalve molluscs. A series of anatomical models was also produced - almost certainly based on their own dissections of specimens.

Great attention was paid to achieving the correct appearance of the living animals. A fine speckeld layer of pigment, often applied to the inner surface of the glass, conveyed a jelly-like translucence. Where thicker skin or a textured appearance was required the paint or enamel was applied in deeper coats often mixed with a fine 'granular' material - possibly fused glass.

Many Blaschka models found their way to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, at Harvard and it was here that Professor George Lincoln Goodale, who was planning the new galleries in the adjacent Botanical Museum, first saw them. Convinced that glass would be the ideal medium in which to fashion plant models, he visited the Blaschkas in their Dresden studio in 1886. He persuaded them to make some sample flowers and subsequently commissioned them to produce models of plants on a half-time contract.

It was a pity for the future of the glass models of marine creatures that this offer was made at precisely the same time as they were making such advances in the scientific accuracy of their models. The production of the botanical models came to take up more and more of their time.

By 1890 the Blaschkas decided that they no longer wished to divide their time between the plant and animal models. They were offered an exclusive, ten year contract with Harvard and work on the animals came to a halt. Leopold died in 1895 at the age of 73. By the time of Rudolf's death the botanical collection consisted of some 847 life size model plants, and over 3,000 enlarged flowers and plant sections. Periodically renewing the Harvard contract, Rudolf continued the work on his own right up until 1936. He died three years after he finally ceased to work on the flowers at the age of 82.

While the flowers remain a highly valued part of the collections of the Botanical museum, Harvard, and the Corning Museum of Glass, the collections of the glass animals have not been so fortunate. Many are either lost, or, because of changing fashions, removed from display. It is hoped that this publication and the accompanying exhibitions will help to rekindle interest in these curious and irreplaceable creations.

 

 

 

 

This essay was first published in the catalogue to accompany the touring exhibition 'Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka: The Glass Aquarium' and we would like to thank Chris Meechan and Dr Henri Reiling for their permission to include the essay in the IIRG's Gateway to Glass.

The exhibition 'Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka: the glass aquarium' was shown at The Design Museum, London, Two Ten Gallery, Wellcome Trust, London, The National Glass Centre, Sunderland and the Aberdeen Museum and Art Gallery, Aberdeen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Special thanks to the National Museum and Art Gallery of Wales, Cardiff for permission to use illustrations of the Blaschka models in their collection.

Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka; 19th Century glass models of natural history.