Glass

Glass is a subject in art. The gallery holds 73 works in this subject in art, including works by Thomas Eakins, Francis William Edmonds and Johannes Vermeer.

In the visual arts, glass occupies a special place as both a coveted luxury object and a supreme test of a painter's skill. Although vessels appear in Roman wall painting and medieval manuscripts, glass emerged as a subject in its own right alongside the rise of European glassmaking. From the fifteenth century, craftsmen on the Venetian island of Murano perfected cristallo, an almost colourless, transparent glass prized as the finest in the world; by the sixteenth century they had mastered colour, filigree canework and mirror-making, and Venetian glass became a byword for wealth and refinement across Europe. As prosperity spread to the Netherlands, painted glassware came to signal the affluence of merchant patrons.

The depiction of glass crystallised into a genre during the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age, where it served two purposes at once. Technically, the transparent bowl of a roemer—a green-stemmed drinking glass whose base was coiled around a conical core and whose stem bore studded prunts for grip—allowed artists to demonstrate command of reflection, refraction and shifting light; painters sometimes set a tiny mirrored window in a glass rim. Symbolically, glass was fragile and easily shattered, so a half-empty or overturned vessel became a staple of vanitas painting, a reminder of life's transience and the vanity of worldly pleasure.

The principal masters include Clara Peeters, whose Venetian Glass, Roemer and a Candlestick (1607) shows precocious skill; Pieter Claesz, an early painter of the roemer; and above all Willem Kalf, the leading exponent of the lavish pronkstilleven, who picked transparent Venetian forms out of deep shadow with dabs and dots of light. The catalogue holds Jan Davidsz. de Heem's Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, a jewel-like rendering of a roemer beside shucked oysters, and Johannes Vermeer's Allegory of the Catholic Faith, where a hanging glass sphere becomes a theological emblem.

This tradition shaped later European still life through Jean-Siméon Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and its fascination with transparent surfaces echoes onward to nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism. (The word also survives as the surname Glass, of Cornish, English, German, Slavic, Irish or Scottish origin.) Few subjects so fully unite virtuoso technique with moral meaning.