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]
Another interesting class of diamond-scratched Dutch glass is well
represented in the British Museum. Here we find portraits of
contemporary celebrities, of members of the house of Orange in many
cases, together with coats-of-arms, scratched on the bowls of
wine-glasses—either conical glasses of Venetian forms or tall narrow
‘flutes.’ Sometimes, indeed, designs of this character are found on
winged glasses of purely Venetian type. Mr. Nesbitt was of opinion that
these were made in Venice (Slade Catalogue, No. 891), but we now know,
thanks to M. Schuermans’ researches, that such glasses may well have
been produced at this time in the north. The similarity in form of the
bulbs or knops on the stems of all the glasses of this series should be
noted: in no case is there any trace of cutting with the wheel on this
part, still less of any facetting. On a thin funnel-shaped glass
(Slade, No. 889) we have on one side the arms of England and
Orange-Nassau impaled, on the other is a portrait of a lady in the
costume of the middle of the seventeenth century, doubtless the
‘counterfeit’ of Mary, Princess of Orange, the daughter of Charles I.
It is to her that we must refer the inscription in Gothic letters,
‘_Het Welvaren Van De Princes_.’ In these Dutch glasses scratched with
the diamond may be found perhaps the earliest instances of glasses
‘that have been made to speak.’
[Illustration:
_PLATE XLIII_
BEAKER WITH THE FOUR SEASONS IN MEDALLIONS
DESIGN SCRATCHED WITH DIAMOND. DATED 1663. PROBABLY NETHERLANDISH]
Of quite another nature were the elaborate compositions engraved for
the most part with the wheel upon plates of glass. It was to work of
this kind that Gerard Dou was brought up by his father—himself ‘a
glass-worker and writer on glass,’ and subsequently master of the
glass-makers’ guild at Leyden. The younger Dou was apprenticed to one
Dolendo, who is described as ‘a right good plate-etcher,’ before he
entered the studio of Rembrandt (Martin, _Gerard Dou_, pp. 28-29).
There came into fashion in Holland in the next century a method of
engraving on glass, if engraving it can be called, of quite a different
nature. This is the stipple or dotted method, the _stip_ of the Dutch,
by which a design of the utmost delicacy—a mere breath, as it were—is
made to appear on the surface of the glass. When examined with a glass
the decoration is seen to be built up of minute dots as in a stipple
engraving,[226] differing from the latter, however, in this, that in
the case of the work on the glass, the lights are given by the dots and
the clear untouched ground represents the shadow.
One of the earliest masters, if not the inventor of this method, was
Frans Greenwood, who appears indeed to have worked with the wheel also.
Greenwood—his name would point to an English extraction—was born at
Rotterdam in 1680, and the latest date found on his engraved work is
1743. There is in the British Museum a wine-glass with a Bacchic
subject, a highly finished example of this _pointillé_ process, signed
‘F. Greenwood f^t.’ In the eighteenth century this stippling on glass
was practised by painters of some note. Thus there are two glasses in
the Rijks Museum (dated 1750 and 1751) both stippled with portrait
heads, which bear the signature of Aart Schouman, a portrait-painter of
repute at the time. But the greatest master of the art was Wolf, an
eccentric genius who lived at the Hague. We know little of him except
that he married in 1787, and died young in 1808. Glasses stippled with
graceful designs by this master, somewhat in the manner of Bartolozzi,
are perhaps less rare than those of Greenwood or Schouman. Some of his
engravings are found upon goblets of flint glass with facetted stems,
of English make, probably. On an example of his work in the British
Museum a graceful female figure bears a scroll with the words, ‘_Werken
van het genootschap. K.W.D.A.V._’
The tradition of Wolf was carried on by Daniel Henriques de Castro, who
died as late as 1862. The son of the latter artist, in an article on
the subject in the first volume of _Oud Holland_, has collected some
traditions bearing on the methods of execution of this now lost
process. The author relates how he had come across an old man who had
watched Wolf while at work on one of his glasses; according to his
report, his only tools were an etching-needle and a small hammer. This
is a matter of some importance, as both the late Mr. Nesbitt and Mr.
Hartshorne appear to have taken it for granted that this delicate
film-like engraving was produced, in part at least, by means of acid.
But the two processes can hardly have been combined, and the effect is
quite unlike that produced when the surface of glass is eaten away by
hydrofluoric acid. It would, indeed, be quite impossible to produce
such delicate work by any etching process of this latter kind.[227]
I shall have something to say of the Dutch wine-glasses of the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when I come to speak of the
English glasses that were in a measure founded on them. Suffice to
mention that already, before the end of the seventeenth century, we
find on these glasses the welted foot and the baluster stem moulded and
uncut, enclosing one or more ‘tears’—forms that somewhat later passed
over to England.