This vase commemorates one of the most successful glass company managers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a present of staff members—35 names are listed in a frieze—of the glass factory of Val-Saint-Lambert in Belgium to Georges Deprez, who started to work at the factory in 1887 and became its director in 1894. In 1912, the year of his retirement, Deprez looked back on 25 years of work for the company, which he had developed successfully into the “probably most important producer for crystal and glass for daily use in the world” (Le Temps, Paris 1913). Around 1900 about 4,500 workers produced 160,000 items per day at 20 furnaces, 90% of which was exported to the whole world, even to Australia. The vase had formed part of the company's museum in Val-Saint-Lambert, which was dissolved in the 1990s.