Much opaque white glass was made in Germany, as in other countries, in the first years of the eighteenth century. By this means it was hoped to find an equivalent for the Oriental porcelain, which had not yet been successfully imitated. At South Kensington may be seen a covered beaker of this milch-glas elaborately painted with a baroque design; more often, however, the decoration on such ware is in a pseudo-Chinese style. Von Czihak has extracted from the contemporary work of a certain Kundmann, a learned doctor and dilettante, a recipe for making this glass with human bones; this formula, the author states, he obtained from Kunckel (Rariora Naturæ et Artis. Breslau, 1737). Kundmann claims for this glass, prepared from bones found in heathen burial-urns, that it surpassed in whiteness the best porcelain. On one of his glasses preserved in the museum at Breslau, there is a quaint Latin inscription. You are asked to offer a libation to those poor heathens for whom, after suffering both on the field of battle and in the furnace of the glass-maker, the pains of hell are reserved. Kundmann had too, in his cabinet, some little glasses on which were engraved the tobacco-plant and other designs relating to smoking. These, he declared, were prepared solely from sand and tobacco ash (Schlesische Gläser, p. 62).

There is one important branch of the Bohemian-Silesian glass industry, of which before ending a word must be said. This is the manufacture of beads and other kinds of verroterie, as well as of glass pastes for artificial jewellery.

Paternoster Kügelchen were probably made from an early date: the art may have been learned from wandering Venetians. In Bohemia, Betel-Hütten (‘bead furnaces’) are mentioned early in the seventeenth century. At Winterberg, of eight glass-furnaces four are so described. Here we have the very word (Betel, from Bete, a prayer) from which we have formed our term ‘bead.’ But nothing quite equivalent to this last convenient word ever came into use in Germany. From the word Paternoster-Kugel, when at a later time the demand came rather for beads for personal ornament or for export, the Germans passed to the ambiguous expression Perlen or Glas-Perlen.

The manufacture of the more elaborate forms of beads by means of the blow-pipe—the suppialume process of the Venetians—spread slowly in the north. Doppelmayr (op. cit., p. 226) states that the use of ‘a little copper pipe fixed over a burning lamp’ for making small objects of glass was first taught at Nuremberg by one Abraham Fino, who came from Amsterdam in 1630. The Dutch, he says, had been taught the art by a Venetian. Kunckel, on the Pfauen-Insel, was occupied in making beads for exportation to West Africa by the newly founded Brandenburg African Company. In the early years of the eighteenth century the competition with Venice was keen, but in this branch the Italians seem to have held their own. Not so, however, in the kindred industry, the manufacture of glass pastes for artificial jewellery. Before the middle of the century, certain districts in Northern Bohemia obtained almost a monopoly in this art. These ‘Bohemian stones’ were made first at Turnau, by the Fischer brothers. This was early in the century; by 1786 there were, it is said, 443 master-workmen in the district thus employed. After that time the first place was held by the rival town of Steinschönau, to this day the centre of the industry (Lobmeyr, Die Glas Industrie, 1874, p. 135).

CHAPTER XVIII
DUTCH GLASS OF THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

In Holland the War of Independence does not seem to have interfered with the work of the glass furnaces already established in several of the towns by Altarists or Venetians. M. Schuermans, who has devoted a section of one of his letters to Holland (op. cit., vol. xxix. pp. 147-66), finds traces of the Italians at Bois-le-Duc, Middelburg, Haarlem, and Amsterdam. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century there were already at Amsterdam glass-houses managed by Dutchmen. M. Henri Havard has found in the registers of the States-General mention of two Dutch glass-makers who obtained at this time a privilege for fifteen years to make ‘glasses for Rhine wine in the shape of roemers as well as beer glasses’ by certain new processes (Oud Holland, i. 182). For a time there was an active rivalry between the glass-makers of Amsterdam and Antwerp: at a later period the enterprising Liége family of the Bonhommes obtained a footing in several Dutch towns. But, as I have already said, the ‘green glass’ of the Rhine (not always necessarily green or even coloured) was from early times in favour in Holland, if indeed we are not to regard it as indigenous in the country. At a later period there is no doubt that most of the finer specimens were made there. It is glasses of this class, roemers in the first place, but also tall ‘flutes,’ that we see so often in the works of the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. Those of a Venetian type, on the other hand, though by no means absent, are much rarer than in the contemporary paintings of the Flemish school.

The Dutch seem above all to have esteemed the ruimer or roemer; on glasses of this shape the finest engraving and diamond-scratching were expended, and it was these glasses that they selected to mount on tall silver stands of elaborate workmanship. There are the bekerschroeven (beaker-screws), which may at times be seen on the buffet in a seventeenth-century Dutch interior. There are several fine examples of these trophy-like arrangements in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam.

For us, seeing that we must confine ourselves to points of real artistic interest or historical significance, the glass made by the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is of importance mainly under these two aspects: 1. That here the art of engraving, or rather scratching, with the diamond was carried to greater perfection than in any other country. 2. That starting from the close of the seventeenth century, the forms and methods of construction of the Dutch drinking-glasses (apart from the roemer) first greatly influenced, and then in turn were influenced by, our English glasses.

As in Germany, where the Emperor Ferdinand III. learned the art, drawing with the diamond on glass was in Holland practised as an elegant accomplishment by people in good position, and above all by ladies. Indeed we are here brought into contact with a cultured literary set, a coterie of which the members held a higher social, and perhaps intellectual, position than we can allow to the majority of the great painters of the day whose names are better known to us. Typical frequenters of this circle were the three sisters, daughters of Roemer Vischer, who were immortalised in the songs of Huyghens, Cats, and Hooft (Don Henriques de Castro, ‘Een en ander over Glasgravure,’ Oud Holland, i. 286; see also Hartshorne, p. 48). A still more famous literary lady was Anna Maria van Schurman, who among so many other accomplishments had, as Cats has recorded, mastered the art ‘met een diamant op het glas gheestigh to schrijven.’[[224]] Several good examples of the work of these ladies, which took the form for the most part of mottoes engraved with scrolls and flourishes on the bowls of roemers, are preserved in the Rijks Museum: some of these have been admirably reproduced by Mr. Hartshorne in his work on English glasses.[[225]]