May 18 – November 25, 2007
Changing Exhibitions Gallery
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Scientific marvels; drop-dead beautiful works of art; a genus onto themselves: these are just a few of the explanations given to describe the allure of a legendary, century-old bevy of exquisite glass blossoms and fruits.
Salvia patens Cav. Blue Sage. Lamiaceae. Model 118 (1889). Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. The Harvard University Herbaria - Harvard Museum of Natural History. Photo by Hillel Burger.
In “Botanical Wonders: The Story of the Harvard Glass Flowers,” The Corning Museum of Glass brings to bear its unique curatorial, conservation, and glassmaking capabilities to illuminate more fully than ever before the story of the delicate glass replicas of botanical specimens known as the Glass Flowers of Harvard.
The exhibition celebrates the singular triumph of glassmakers Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895) and his son Rudolf (1857-1939); provides insight into the intellectual appetite of the late Victorians, through the lens of botany as an academic discipline; and offers close-ups of the people and the craft process behind the Glass Flowers.
The Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) will lend 17 of its rarely loaned, fragile Glass Flowers for the occasion. These core works will be amplified by examples of other Blaschka specimens, all sea creatures, drawn from holdings owned by Cornell University and stored and safeguarded by the Corning Museum under a long-term agreement.
The Blaschkas’ botanical drawings, robustly rendered and notated in preparation for glass working, will be exhibited for the first time in “Botanical Wonders.” Purchased by The Corning Museum of Glass as part of a trove of family materials, and executed mostly in pencil and watercolor, these sketches have an immediacy and unpolished quality that is extraordinarily appealing today. A selection of period photographs, personal papers, and business records will be drawn as well from the archive for this presentation.
The exhibition is curated by David Whitehouse, executive director of The Corning Museum of Glass, and Susan Rossi-Wilcox, administrator for the Glass Flowers Collection for the Harvard Museum of Natural History.