Several members of the Leighton family were employed at the New England Glass Company for much of the time that the firm was in business (1818–1888). Thomas Leighton, an English glassblower who was working in Edinburgh, Scotland, was hired in 1826 to be the chief gaffer or superintendent of the young New England company, and he was in charge of its production until his death in 1849. His son, John H. Leighton, who had been apprenticed at the age of 13, then directed the factory until 1874. John Leighton’s son, Henry, was born in 1837. In the early 1850s, he was trained as an engraver by Louis Vaupel, chief engraver of the New England firm. Henry began to work for the company in 1856, and then left to serve as a soldier during the Civil War. He returned to East Cambridge, but in 1877 he moved to the Meriden Flint Glass Company in Connecticut. He died in April 1878. The Museum has acquired a number of pieces that descended in the Leighton family. The most recent of these additions is this tumbler, which was owned by one of Henry Leighton’s descendants. According to that descendant, Henry engraved the piece either for himself or as a gift for a family member. The tumbler shows three images of dogs, each in a different pose. Like the two other engraved tumblers by Leighton in the Corning collection, it is an individual piece and not a standard pattern. One of those two tumblers shows a dog leaping at a tree, while the other depicts a hare and two dogs running through fields. Leighton’s hunting scenes have been characterized as “particularly vivid” and “amazingly clear and lifelike” (Watkins, pp. 122 and 126; see below). The association of the Leightons with the New England Glass Company is described in Lura Woodside Watkins, Cambridge Glass, 1818 to 1888: The Story of the New England Glass Company, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1930, pp. 162–166. Henry Leighton is mentioned in Jane Shadel Spillman, “A Glass Engraver’s Design Book, 1860–1880,” The Magazine Antiques, v. 168, no. 2, August 2005, pp. 64–69.