Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society

September 28th, 2006

Blaschka Conference

Today marks the start of the three-day Dublin Blaschka Conference, the first-ever international meeting focused on the work of the 19th-century glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. The German father and son team created impossibly life-like natural history models and teaching specimens with virtuosic skill that has never since been replicated. The Blaschkas are most well known today for their glass flower collection on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, but equally impressive are the marine invertebrates they created for museums around the world. From the Design Museum’s exhibit on the Blaschkas:

Aquaria and natural history museums were then opening all over the world. As the techniques for preserving real plants or creatures were so rudimentary, they needed life-like replicas to exhibit and turned to Leopold Blaschka to provide them. During the 1860s, Leopold supplied glass sea-anenomes to museums, aquaria and private collectors all over Europe. He then added snails and jellyfish to his repertoire and in 1876 received a large order from London’s South Kensington Museum (now the Natural History Museum). …

Other replicas were inspired either by the Blaschkas’ own memories of seeing the real creatures - like the first jellyfish which Leopold remembered from a trip to North America - or by copying preserved specimins. In later years, as the Blaschkas became wealthier, they acquired live specimins to work from. These were kept in a specially built aquarium at their Dresden home.

Everything they made was specially commissioned. By 1888, the catalogue of their work published by Henry Ward, the Blaschkas’ US agent, listed more than 700 models including: squids, sea slugs, octopi, cuttlefish, dead men’s fingers, sea squirts and countless different types of jellyfish. …

Today, the Blaschkas seem remarkably contemporary: working as they did on the cusp of design, craft, art and industry. In early 2001, one of their 1890 painted glass Polychate Worms from Cardiff appeared on the cover of Frieze, the British art magazine. Even in their own era, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka resisted conventional definitions and described themselves as “natural history artisans”. As for their work, it was hailed at the time as: “an artistic marvel in the field of science and a scientific marvel in the field of art.”

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Blaschka Conference

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