art by the Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who brought home reports of the demand among Eastern nations for imitation gems, especially pearls, and these were consequently made in vast quantities for exportation.
Not all her jealous care, however, could prevent the art of Venice from spreading to other countries. The makers of these flower models of the Ware Collection claim that their ancestors brought from Venice to Bohemia the secrets of their craft. Be this as it may, Bohemia was the next country to manufacture glass, and the Bohemians introduced a new decorative system, that of engraving glass. To this succeeded the art of glass cutting and of luster making as well as that of painting glass.
Germany, France, and Belgium were not slow to follow Bohemia, and in each country new processes and new decorative ideas were developed. Thus the manufacture of glass spread throughout the civilized world.
To come down to the personal history of the artists in question, Leopold Blaschka was born in 1822, in Aicha, a village of northern Bohemia. His father, Joseph Blaschka, was not only a skilled glass worker, but was also an able mechanic and electrician.
After his early education in the grammar school of his native town, Leopold Blaschka was placed in the studio of the painter Eisner, with whom he studied for some time. At the same time he acquired from his father a thorough knowledge of the gold-smith's trade, becoming expert in the cutting and setting of gems and in gold and silver work—a knowledge which he put to a practical use in the manufacture of fancy articles for exportation.
From childhood, however, he had felt an absorbing interest in natural history, and when in the interest of his business he made a voyage in a sailing vessel to America in 1854, he found ample opportunity during a calm at sea to make many studies and drawings of marine invertebrates. On his return he began what proved to be his life work—the modeling of plants and animals in glass.
Some of these earlier models came under the notice of the botanist Prince Camille de Rohan, for whom Blaschka made a collection of about sixty orchids in glass. These were first exhibited in Prince de Rohan's palace in Prague in 1862. They afterward came into the possession of the museum at Liége, where they, were unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1863.
Certain annoying circumstances connected with one of these earlier collections, together with the fate of the Liége models, gave Blaschka a distaste for this branch of his work, which he abandoned forthwith, devoting himself exclusively to the manufacture of animal models.
