GLASS OF BOHEMIA.
This beautiful article is manufactured in various places throughout Germany—most largely amid the very mountainous districts of Bohemia; some of the best, however, is made in Bavaria and sent to Bohemia, and thence exported. The materials from which the glass is formed consist chiefly of the same as those used in England; the manufacturers themselves seem to believe that there is no difference except in the proportions of the materials, and in the fuel, which is exclusively wood, and produces, by a little attention, a more constant and intense heat than can be produced by any coal; the feeding of the furnace with the latter material, they say, always creates a change in the temperature detrimental to the fluid above, and never sufficiently intense. The wooded mountains of Bohemia are entirely inhabited by a population whose industry, morals, hospitality, and kindliness of manners, do honor, not only to this rich and beautiful kingdom, but to the whole human race. They are pure Germans, not of Sclavish origin, and the German dialect alone is spoken. Unlike every other manufacturing district I have ever visited, they retain unimpaired all their rural and primitive virtues. Clean to a proverb, in their houses and persons, hospitable and amiable in their manners, simple in their habits, cheerful and devoted in their religion, they form perhaps, the happiest community in the world. In passing through the country, a stranger would never find out that he was in a manufacturing district, but might fancy himself in the green valleys of a partly pastoral, partly agricultural people. Thickly inhabited, the beautiful little cottages, clustered into villages, or scattered along the glens, or sides of the hills, are embowered with fruit trees, and encircled with shrubs and flowers, which each cottager cultivates with a zeal peculiar to his race; on every side rich fields of grain or pasture stretch out like a vast enamelled carpet between the hills, which are clothed in dense forest of spruce, fir, pine, and beech, filled with deer, roe, and capercalzie; they extend in every direction, far beyond the reach of the eye, one vast cloud of verdure. The fabriques or factories, are placed generally in the middle of one of these villages, the extent of which can only be known by going from house to house; so closely is each hid in its own fruit-bower, and so surrounded by shrubs and flowers, that the eye can only pick up the buildings by their blue smoke, or get a glimpse of them here and there as you advance; thus some of the villages are elongated to three miles, forming the most delicious walk along its grassy road, generally accompanied by a stream, always overhung by a profusion of wild flowers, the mountain-ash, and weeping birch; many of the former only to be found in our gardens. It has a very picturesque effect to see the inhabitants of these villages with their simple costume; and if it rains, their umbrellas, often of rich colors like their glass, scarlet, green, and deep crimson, with beautiful ruby, emerald, or turquoise handles; not such as a stranger might suppose a gaudy glass bauble, but rich and massive, and having all the appearance of the solid, gold, and gem-studded handles of the oriental weapons.
The fabrique is built like the rest of the cottages, and only differs from them in size, and the shape and height of its chimney, which emitting only wood smoke, has none of the dense sulphuric cloud which blackens and poisons the neighborhood of coal-fed factories: it is never that ostentatious building for whose magnitude and embellishments the public are obliged to pay, in the increased charges on its productions. The glass fabriques of Bohemia are all small, in fact only one large apartment, in the centre of which is the furnace, a circular structure divided into eight compartments containing the melted metal for as many colors; one man and a boy are stationed at the door of each compartment, the former to extract the fluid with his pipe, the latter to hold the wooden mould[1] in which the article is blown and shaped. The number of hands employed in an ordinary fabrique, are:—Eight men who work in the metal, take it from the fire, and blow it in the moulds; eight helps to hold the moulds, &c.; four to stir the metal, &c.; two breakers; four day laborers.
The best men are sometimes paid from eighteen to twenty shillings a week, and provide their own food, which is good; and as they require much nourishment from the exhausting effects of the heat, it consists of meat, vegetables, and a vast quantity of beer; those who are employed about the furnace especially, drink from twelve to fifteen quarts a day; it is a clear, bitter beverage, which they, in common with all the German race, like beyond every thing else, but it is of little strength; intoxication is almost unknown, and as a proof of their careful and excellent character, in one of the above-mentioned villages, three miles in length, a fire had not been known in the memory of the oldest inhabitants I questioned, though the houses from the ground to the roof are made entirely of wood.
The materials of which the glass is composed, as far as can be ascertained, and they seem to make no secret of it, appear to be the same as those in use in England; they say, they derive their perfection from their mode of mixing and burning the material. Thus the principal component parts are:—Sand; chalk; potash; brimstone; arsenic, mixed with various colors, regulated by the principal:—Uran oxide; cobalt oxide; coppré oxide; nickel oxide; chrom oxide; minium; tin oxide.
The gold used in ornamenting the glass is from the purest ducats, dissolved in strong acid (artz wasser), the oil with which the colors are mixed is of turpentine (harz öhl).
BOHEMIAN GLASS PAINTER.
Nothing is done in most of the blowing fabriques but mixing the material, and coloring; and for cutting, polishing, &c., from three to six wheels are used—all the finishing goes on in the little cottages by which the furnace is surrounded, and with which the valleys and sides of the hills are studded; here you find, within the contracted chambers of these small block-houses, if on the ground-flat, standing on an earthen[2] floor like our Highland cottages, an artist of the first ability, tracing the exquisite scrolls and flowers which we see in these beautiful works of art; and which are performed by men bearing all the appearance of simple cotters; but whose hand sweeps free and careless over the glass with the confidence and ease of an experienced artist; seldom being provided with more than two very ordinary looking brushes, a small one and another a size larger, and working frequently without any pattern, or indicating lines upon the glass they are painting; but perfect from habitude, the scrolls, and wreaths, and flowers, come out with the same facility as one traces a name upon the dewy pane of a window. Often the whole family are brought up from childhood in painting and in drawing on glass, and thus producing a race of hereditary artists; boys from thirteen and upwards are employed in the most delicate works in this genre of art. Each cottage where the painting and gilding go on, is provided with a small oven, into which the glass is put to bake in the colors, where it is kept for a day and allowed to cool down; the white figures and flowers, when they go into the oven, are of a dark chrome color, but come out pure white, as will be observed on examining any glass on which flowers of this color are painted; the gold, also, when laid on, is of a dead brown, and when burnt in, is polished, generally by women of the family. The gold in many instances is left unpolished, and only the stalks and fibres are burnished, which give an excellent effect. It is most interesting to go from one cottage to another; in one you are amazed by the exquisite paintings in gold, silver, and colors; in another, the cutting out all those beautiful leaf-work, lily, bell-flower, octagon, and star-shaped vases, which is done, not only by men, but by their children, girls and boys. In one cottage, I was particularly struck by a man, his two daughters, and son, sitting at as many wheels, cutting the most elaborate, but delicate, figures; shaping from the merely turned over bell vases, those beautiful varieties of lily and flower-indented lamps for suspension, and vessels for holding bouquets, tracing the scrolls, stalks, and fibres, with the same ease as the bare-footed wife and mother prepared their supper in the wooden bowl on the earth-floor behind them; for there was but one apartment for the fine arts, the nursery, and the kitchen, yet all was neatness, perfect cleanliness, and order; while on the long beam which formed the sill of the three mullion windows, was arranged a number of glass objects in the glorious colors of Bohemian art—ruby, emerald, topaz, chrysopras, turquoise; with pure crystals, which, richly cut, reflected, like a rainbow, the gems by which they are surrounded. In another cottage, in Steinchönau, I was much pleased with the designs which two young men were painting, both in gold, and colors; of which the former were scrolls of a very superior character, and the latter, flowers, butterflies, and insects. I questioned one of the men respecting the forms and characteristics of those he was painting, and which were beautiful illustrations of Natural History; when he brought me in, from a little bed-room, or rather closet, two boxes full of exquisitely preserved specimens of a great variety of native insects, which he had collected in his leisure hours, and arranged himself, to assist him in his painting. The copies were facsimiles of the originals, both as to colors and character. Among these insects I observed a beautiful miniature crawfish, not so large as a shrimp, a native, also, of the streams in his neighborhood. So identified had these productions of nature become with his imagination, that he was, at the moment I came in, painting some most correctly, without any specimen before him. It is impossible to express the feelings produced by these people, so simple, so industrious, and, above all, so modest. They could not refrain from surprise at the admiration their every-day productions created in us; and these simple artisans would with difficulty believe that their works were sought for, and thus valued, in all powerful and wealthy England, where they believe nothing is unknown, nothing imperfect, nothing impossible! One man whom I visited is an extraordinary genius, rarely to be met with; he has been driven by the force of that same genius, to seek abroad, in France and Bavaria (Munich), food for his mind, and has brought back with him several folio works of engravings from the best masters, from which he designs. Placing before him one of these works, a Raphael or a Rubens, he either copies the group, or composes from them to suit the form of his vase, which he thus embellishes with the most exquisite figures; his name is Charles Antoin Günther. He lives in a little block-house, as humble as the commonest of those above described, on the declivity of a brae, by a small stream, on which stand the little scattered village of Steinschönau. It is composed of only two apartments below, of which his work-room is one, and which is not above ten feet square, with just space enough to hold four little lathes for engraving glass, at one of which he works himself, while the others are occupied by three boys, the youngest twelve and a-half years old, the eldest fifteen! They all engrave beautifully, pieces laid before them by Günther, and which they follow with a faithfulness and spirit only to be believed on personal inspection. He was at work himself on a vase goblet, of the shape of the usual green hock-glass, but which might contain a bottle; it was lapis lazuli blue, enriched by a group of Bacchanalian Cupids and vine-leaves of his own composition, and worked with a spirit and freedom worthy of some of the masters by whose works he was surrounded. What struck me most, was one of those exquisite little figures of Raphael's, in his great picture of the "Madona del Sixto," in the Royal Gallery at Dresden. The cherub leaning on the parapet, with his chin resting on one hand, as he gazes on the Virgin; it is exquisitely drawn in pencil, a fac-simile, and pinned on the wooden wall of the engraver's cottage, immediately opposite his seat. I asked him how he first traced on the glass the subjects which he was to cut; he replied by taking up a plain glass without any figure or indication on its surface, and asking me what subject I should like engraved. On my replying that, being an old deer-stalker, I should be very well pleased with a stag; he immediately applied the wheel to the glass, and in five minutes by my watch, produced one of the most splendid, spirited animals I ever saw in the forest, and really worthy of Landseer; the stag is making a spring over some broken palings and rough foreground, and his action and parts can only be appreciated by those who have lived with the deer on the hill and watched them with the feelings of a hill-man, like Günther, who has had opportunities of seeing the deer in his own native woods, where they abound. I brought this glass away with me, though in itself but an inferior article; merely as a specimen of what I had seen done by this man in the space of five minutes, without a copy or any thing to guide him on the smooth surface of the goblet.