Harvard's Flowers

The glass miracles of Blaschka & Son

Hidden away in Harvard’s Museum of Natural History is a gallery of miraculously lifelike flowers made in Vienna in lamp-worked glass, here photographed with my phone.

The 4,300 glass models were made over fifty years, 1886-1936, in Vienna by Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf. The delicacy and vividness of them is staggering.

Imagine making these things and shipping them to Boston. Incredible. The glass has wire cores and some parts are painted and have other materials applied to give texture but almost everything you see is glass.

The Blaschkas were from a family of Bohemian glassworkers. Leopold started out making glass eyes, before moving on to jellyfish models and sea anemones, some of which are in Pisa - which I long to visit - and then flowers. He made 100 glass orchids for Prince Camille de Rohan, who exhibited them on artificial trees in his palace in Prague. The Harvard flowers were paid for by Mary Lee Ware, a former botany student there, to whom Leopold wrote explaining his craft…

‘Many people think that we have some secret apparatus by which we can squeeze glass suddenly into these forms, but it is not so. We have the touch. My son Rudolf has more than I have because he is my son and the touch increases in every generation. The only way to become a glass modeler of skill, I have often said to people, is to get a good great-grandfather who loved glass; then he is to have a son with like tastes; he is to be your grandfather. He in turn will have a son who must, as your father, be passionately fond of glass. You, as his son, can then try your hand, and it is your own fault if you do not succeed…’