page_title: Glass sea creatures
section_title: A successful business
hierarchical_section_title: Glass sea creatures / A successful business
caption_attribution_description: Sea animals, glass objects by Leopold Blaschka (1822 - 1895), Museo di Storia Naturale e del Territorio, Calci (Province Pisa), Italy
context_page_description: The glass sea creatures are works of glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. The artistic predecessors of the Glass Flowers, the sea creatures were the output of the Blaschkas' successful mail-order business of supplying museums and private collectors around the world with sets of glass models of marine invertebrates.
  Between 1863 and 1880, the Blaschkas – working in Dresden – executed at least 10,000 of these highly detailed glass models, representing some 700 different species.
  A number of large collections of the models are held by museums and other academic institutions. Harvard's Museum of Natural History exhibits many of the Blaschka's glass creations, and its Museum of Comparative Zoology hold 430 items in the Blaschka Glass Invertebrate Collection and display about 60 at any given time. Cornell University has about 570 items in its collection and has restored some 170 of these, with many others in its collection stored at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. The largest collection in Europe, of 530 pieces, is at Ireland's Natural History Museum.
context_section_description: Unlike the eventual Glass Flower, a private commission to a single University's museum, the Blaschka glass sea creatures were a global enterprise; and not just for museums and other such educational institutes, for "as popular interest in the history and sciences of the natural world burgeoned during the latter half of the 19th century, the sea became particularly alluring. The spread of home aquariums and the advent of deep-sea diving revealed a new frontier, filled with wondrous and unusual creatures." In short, for the first time since Darwin, there was great universal interest in the natural world, and it became a sign of culture, of worldliness and sophistication, to exhibit examples of life in one's drawing rooms and parlors. Hence private individuals were after these extraordinary models as well, and the Blaschkas, knowing this and knowing that Reichenbach was correct in that many museums would want them, made a mail-order business out of it. This business was hugely successful and they ended up making and selling 10,000 glass invertebrates dispersed in a diaspora of shipments all across the globe. Indeed, "the world had never seen anything quite like the beautiful, scientifically accurate Blaschka models" and yet they were available via so common a means as mail-order per one's local card catalog; for example, Ward's Natural Science would sell a small glass octopus for approximately $2.50. Not glorious, perhaps, but highly effective, and museums and universities began purchasing them en masse to put on display much as Prof. Reichenbach had – for natural history museums directors the world over had the same marine invertebrate showcasing problem. In short, Blaschka invertebrate models mail-order enterprise succeeded for two reason: 1- there was a huge and global demand; 2- they were the only and best glass artists capable of crafting literally scientifically flawless models. Initially the designs for these were based on drawings in books, but Leopold was soon able to use his earlier drawings to produce highly detailed models of other species, and his reputation quickly spread.
  As Leopold wrote in an English-language trade catalog preserved at the Rakow Research Library at The Corning Museum of Glass: "[Models of invertebrate animals] have been purchased by... museums and scholastic establishments in all the quarters of the globe... in New Zealand... in Tokio [sic], Japan... for the Indian Museum in Calcutta... in the United States of America by Professor Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York; for the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts; for the Boston Society of Natural History; the University of Cornell; the Wellesley Female College... In Great Britain, Scotland and Ireland, copies have been conveyed to London, Edinburgh and Dublin... In Austria, orders have not only been made for the Imperial Royal Court collection, but also for the universities in Innsbruck, Graz, Czernovitz, and so forth. In Germany, purchases have been made for the universities of Berlin, Bonn, Koenigsberg, Jena, Leipzig, Rostock and many other museums." 
  Leopold gradually extended his range of work by studying marine animals from the North Sea, Baltic Sea and Mediterranean,  and later constructed an aquarium at his house, in order to keep live specimens from which to model.
  Yet the fate of the marine invertebrate mail-order business was ultimately to be tied to those bought by Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. At some time after the museum's founding in 1859, a collection of 430 glass sea creatures were purchased by either Louis Agassiz, the first director, or his son and successor Alexander Agassiz. This set was not the largest ever sold and the models were no different from any of the others made by the Blaschkas, but their effect was to be greater than all the rest combined.
caption: Blaschka model of jellyfish
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