William De Morgan’s ceramic decoration was often inspired by the medieval world, similar to the practice of his dear friends William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. De Morgan’s vases and tiles were frequently adorned with fantastical animals, beasts, and grotesques. On this vase, two stylized fish recall the designs found in illuminated manuscripts. Their bodies gently...

This slender bud vase by Louis Comfort Tiffany is an exquisite example of the favrile glass technique that the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company developed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. While Louis C. Tiffany experimented with glassmaking leading up to this time, he used outside suppliers to provide him with the production...

The luminous iridescent shades of blue in this 8 ¼ inch tall vase are breathtaking. The neck’s chevron pattern resembles the “rippled” and “feathered” glass in Tiffany’s stained glass windows and famed lamps. This shade of blue is similar to the “aurene blue” created by Steuben Glass Works by 1904 and can be seen in a vase , also...

Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein-Marks, also known as Grete Marks, was a German ceramicist and painter who studied at the Bauhaus School of Arts in Weimer in 1920–21, alongside Paul Klee and Georg Muche. Prior to this, she had attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Cologne and studied painting at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Düsseldorf. Her time at...

Although this vase exemplifies a mid-twentieth century organic style of modernism, it comes from a glass factory with a long tradition of using historical production techniques, located on the island of Murano in Venice, Italy, an important glass-blowing center since the middle ages. In the mid-nineteenth century, Italian lawyer Antonio Salviati developed an interest in glass after...

This glass vase was made in the 17th or 18th century in Iran. It has a delicate applied glass rope ornament at the base of the neck, and is intricately decorated with gold enamel in a diamond and star pattern. The vase was free-blown, which means that it was produced without the use of a...

This vase was designed and made by Hilda Jesser. Jesser attended the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Vienna from 1914 until 1917 where she took classes with members of the Wiener Werkstätte whom she designed for from 1916 to 1921. During her time as a student at the Kunstgewerbeschule she primarily focused on fashion...

It may take a moment to figure out this eccentric vase design: is a tortoise sitting on a faceted plinth or are the two integrated into a single design? This eccentric print actually shows a vase, or an ewer with a lid shaped like a tortoise. Its mouth serves as the sprout, and its tail...

Born and raised in a creative atmosphere dedicated to decorative arts, Suzanne Lalique (1892-1989) was encouraged by her father René, the well-known designer of jewelry and glassware, to participate in the family enterprise. From 1920 to 1930, a large part of the Lalique glass production was inspired by her watercolors, that reveal her passion for...