Now on view in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s, this Ambassador Vase was likely used in the dining room of Agnes Miles Carpenter's "Style Moderne" Fifth Avenue apartment.
One of the most wonderful mixtures of new technology-electricity-with elegant hand-crafted materials, in this case glass and metalwork, is this table lamp. It shines forth with the strength of electricity but uses soda glass to create a glow more associated with a pre-electrified era. William Arthur Benson, who was trained as an architect, took up...
The No. 2402 bowl, shown here in what the Fostoria Glass Company called “ebony,” is one of eight pieces of glass tableware designed by George Sakier in the museum’s collection. The bowl was made in 1930, just a year after Fostoria hired Sakier to be their main design consultant. The avant-garde look of this bowl...
Louis Comfort Tiffany used exotic motifs, extraordinary color, and abstracted forms in his lamps and art glass to become one of the most instrumental figures in American design history. While the Tiffany Studios stopped producing goods almost a century ago, the meticulous craftsmanship that went into the making of the studio’s lamps and vases has...
The Austrian architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933) designed a set of drinking glasses in 1931 to be shown at the Exhibition of Interiors in Cologne. His intention was to display to the public how an updated table setting should look. Loos, who was known to have a simplified, rectangular and rectilinear design aesthetic chose the well-known...
The Daum family name has been synonymous with art glass since the late 1800s when the family immigrated to Nancy, France. The patriarch Jean Daum and eldest son Auguste established a glasswork factory with their youngest son Antonin Daum who took the family industrial glass production in a new direction by introducing art glass. Antonin...
Perhaps better known for his illustrations of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Elihu Vedder’s prolific career began in the 1860’s, when the Hudson River School was in its prime, and ended in the early 20th century, when Modernism was taking root. His work, influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, captured the imagination of late 19th-century audiences. Born...
From the archives, an Object of the Day post on an example of iridescent design from the collection.
Two rare Art Deco period catalogues, newly acquired by the CHM library, include illustrations with accompanying specifications and cost for more than 100 glass lighting fixtures manufactured by Meissner Glasraffinerie of Dresden dating circa 1930. Their factory was located at Coswig on the river Elbe situated between Meissen and Dresden, Germany. Not much is recorded...
