Curatorial Staff at The Corning Museum of Glass

Photographs by Hillel Burger, courtesy Harvard Botanical Museum

Salvia patens Cav, Blue Sage, Model 118 (1889). Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. The Harvard University Herbaria - Harvard Museum of Natural History. Photo by Hillel Burger.

Prunus armeniaca L., Apricot (in flower), Model 847 (1936). Rudolf Blaschka. The Harvard University Herbaria - Harvard Museum of Natural History. Photo by Corning Museum of Glass.

Asplenium scolopendrium L. var. americanum (Fern), Hart's Tongue Fern, Model 710 (1903). Rudolf Blaschka. The Harvard University Herbaria - Harvard Museum of Natural History. Photo by Corning Museum of Glass.

Why Harvard,
why glass flowers?

In Victorian times it was impossible for a teacher to demonstrate exactly what an invertebrate looked like without a live specimen, because the spine collapses and color leaches out of one preserved in alcohol. For the same reasons, museums could not include invertebrates or plants in their displays. As Susan Rossi-Wilcox, administrator for the Glass Flowers Collection for the Harvard Museum of Natural History puts it, “Peacocks could be stuffed and minerals meticulously polished, but plants and invertebrates were more problematic. The Blaschkas’ glass models provided curators with displays where the form and color were realistic.”

The famous scientist Louis Agassiz was a key figure in Harvard’s commissioning of the glass models. Recruited by the University to build up its sciences in the mid-1800s, at a time when well-to-do Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic were recently enamored of the new science of natural history, Agassiz saw comprehensive and accurate teaching collections as a core element in a world-class research center.

It was in the context of this social change, then, that George Lincoln Goodale, the first director of the Botanical Museum of Harvard, traveled to Dresden in 1886 to secure the services of the Blaschkas in the creation of a teaching collection of glass models. At first, they were reluctant to embark on a new venture of glass flowers, because they had built a profitable global mail-order business of glass models of invertebrates sold to educational institutions and museums around the world.

Eventually, however, Goodale prevailed, and the Blaschkas agreed to create a few plant models for Harvard. Another hurdle arose, however, for these first precious models were shattered in shipment. Always inventive, the Blaschkas ended up devising a mode of shipping so fail-proof that Dr. Goodale was quoted as saying that the packing of the flowers was “almost as wonderful as anything about them.”

At first, the Blaschkas made models of plants that they were able to grow in their garden or in a greenhouse. But as the Harvard project developed, they were asked to create models of tropical plants, which they needed to observe under natural conditions, and some of their most beautiful specimens resulted from a trip to Jamaica in 1892.

Their glass flowers also include a variety of North American plants, from rarities, like succisa, to such familiar flowers as salvia. In the Blaschkas’ hands, a natural mechanism like pollination takes on the urgency and life of a dramatic mise-en-scène immortalized in glass. Their succisa, for example, depicts two glass butterflies carrying pollen from one violet-colored flower to another. Their models made even the most familiar plant forms, like grasses and ferns, revelatory when seen in replicas that enlarged their structures many hundreds of times.

Rotten fruit
For 46 years, everything the Blaschkas made went to Harvard: nearly 850 sets of models, with more than 4,300 enlarged details, were commissioned. Harvard’s glass garden was not to be an idealized one, however. In the late nineteenth century, there was mounting interest in a new field called economic botany, the study of how plants could be utilized commercially to benefit society. If Harvard students were to better understand the diseases that threaten plants, they needed to know what the blighted specimens looked like. Thus, over time, Harvard commissioned roughly 65 models of exact replicas of diseased fruits.

“That decay should have a place in the pantheon of that most immortal of materials, glass, is fascinating enough. Even more surreal, however, is the fact that the Blaschkas painstakingly enlarged many of these blights many hundreds of times over,” said Dr. Whitehouse. An example is a strangely beautiful fungus enlarged to the size of a cherry. There are also models illustrating the fungus diseases that attack fruits of the Rosaceae family (peaches, strawberries, apples and pears). Another is a strawberry extending from the upper stem of a leafy branch, its life-size rotten fruit covered with just the kind of cotton-like fuzz one associates with decay.

Corning Museum of Glass
The Corning Museum of Glass has worked closely with Harvard University in conserving the specimens in its laboratories. “Conservation is complicated for these delicate works of art, some of which were constructed with glue, paint, and metal armatures as well as glass,” said Rossi-Wilcox, noting that the Corning Museum “has been a true partner of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and in protecting the Glass Flowers from further decay, so that future generations may study and enjoy them.”

To illustrate how the Blaschkas’ worked when making the flowers, the Corning Museum of Glass purchased Rudolf Blaschka’s well-worn wooden “lampworking” table along with his alcohol lamp, pincers, shears, tweezers, and a whisk-like device used for clasping hot glass. Underneath the table is a foot-operated leather and wooden bellows. The Blaschkas employed standard lampworking techniques, in which an artisan uses a small flame to work glass rods, tubes, and minute pieces of glass. Details were made individually by heating the glass until it was soft and could be shaped by simple tools. The parts were then re-heated and assembled by fusing.

The Corning Museum of Glass has twice exhibited the Glass Flowers of Harvard, first in “The Art of the Blaschkas” in 1991, and more recently in 2007 in “Botanical Wonders: The Story of the Harvard Glass Flowers.” This exhibition benefited from insights gleaned from the extensive Blaschka family archive purchased jointly by the Corning Museum and Harvard in 1993.
The Museum’s Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants is named for Mrs. Elizabeth C. Ware and her daughter Mary Lee Ware, who financed the collection and presented it to the Botanical Museum of Harvard as a memorial to their husband and father, Dr. Charles Eliot Ware, Class of 1834.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the north side of the Harvard campus. Open: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. daily except public holidays. Admission: $9; seniors and students $7; ages 3 – 18 $6. Free for Massachusetts residents, Wednesdays 3 p.m. – 5 p.m. and Sundays 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. www.hmnh.harvard.edu.

The Corning Museum of Glass, 1 Museum Way, Corning, New York. Open: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. (8 p.m. May 23 to September 1). Admission: $12.50; Seniors and students $11.25; 17 and under free. www.cmog.org.
An independent, non-profit educational institution, The Corning Museum of Glass is home to the world’s most comprehensive and celebrated collection of glass.