By 1968, Marquis was studying for a master’s degree at Berkeley. He was frustrated, however, by the lack of glassmaking knowledge available in the United States, so he applied for a Fulbright grant to go to Venice and observe glassmaking processes there. He ended up, in 1969, at the famous Venini glassworks on the island of Murano. “At the time I received the Fulbright grant to go to Italy, I was considered one of the most skilled American glassblowers in the fledgling studio glass movement,” Marquis wrote in 1995. “It was a pitiful state of affairs. I was about as skilled as any ten-year-old on Murano.” Blown in shades of blue and green, this bottle reflects the palette available in the 1960s to American studio glass artists, most of whom batched their own glass. Imported commercial glass color bars would not be widely accessible to American artists for another decade.