Drinking Glass

Drinking Glass is a subject in art. The gallery holds 42 works in this subject in art, including works by Francis William Edmonds, Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda.

The drinking glass entered art as both a marvel of craft and a painter's ultimate technical challenge. Glass vessels were prized since Roman antiquity, but two developments made them ubiquitous subjects in early modern Europe. In fifteenth-century Murano, the glassmaker Angelo Barovier perfected cristallo, an almost colourless soda glass that became the most coveted in Europe; its delicate "winged" goblets, known as façon de Venise, were imitated across the continent. In the north, cheaper green forest glass (Waldglas) produced the sturdy roemer, the wide-bowled wine glass on a prunted stem that recurs throughout Dutch painting. As prosperity filled the tables of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, these vessels became fixtures of the still life.

No object tested a painter's skill like glass. Rendering transparency, reflection, refraction and the bright catch-light on a rim demanded supreme control of tone and touch, and the genre became, in part, a showcase of virtuosity. In Haarlem, Willem Claesz Heda and Pieter Claesz refined the near-monochrome "breakfast piece" (ontbijtje), arranging silver, pewter, oysters and glass in restrained palettes of grey, brown and silver. Their compositions often hinge on a tipped diagonal—an upright roemer balanced against a toppled, gleaming wineglass—as in Heda's Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware and Claesz's Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill.

Glass also carried meaning. In vanitas painting, an empty or overturned glass signalled the transience of life and the fragility of worldly pleasure, a theme inaugurated by Jacques de Gheyn II's Vanitas Still Life (1603). The kindred motif of the soap bubble—seen in works by Jean-Siméon Chardin and Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo (Soap Bubbles)—made the same point about ephemerality.

The glass outlived its symbolic origins. Chardin dignified the humble tumbler as pure painting, and by the early twentieth century the wine glass had become a signature motif of Cubism. Picasso, Braque and especially Juan Gris fractured and reassembled it from multiple viewpoints, as in Gris's Abstraction (Guitar and Glass) (1914). From Dutch banquet pieces to modernist still lifes by Diego Rivera and others, the drinking glass remains one of art's most enduring tests of seeing.