Pittsburgh glasshouse founded in 1851 and active throughout the second half of the 19th century. The factory produced tableware and lamps; its glass included flint glass, lime glass and cut glass and, in the 1870s and 1880s, opal ware.
J. Shadel Spillman: ‘Adams & Company’, Glass Club Bull., 163 (1990–91)...Article
Adams & Company
Gordon Campbell
Article
Adams, Mark
Courtney Ann Shaw
(b Fort Plain, NY, Oct 27, 1925; d San Francisco, 2006).
American tapestry artist, painter and stained-glass designer. Adams studied painting at Syracuse University and with Hans Hoffmann in New York, where he was influenced by the medieval tapestries in the Cloisters and also by the work of Matisse. In the 1950s Adams was apprenticed to the influential French tapestry designer Jean Lurçat, from whom he learnt the bold colours and clear imagery that characterize his work. He also studied at the Ecole Nationale d’Art Décoratif in Aubusson before beginning to use a series of workshops, notably that of Marguerite and Paul Avignon, who wove his first nationally acclaimed tapestry, Phoenix and the Golden Gate (1957). Flight of Angels (1962) was exhibited at the first Biennale Internationale de la Tapisserie in Lausanne. In 1976 his cartoon of California Poppies (San Francisco, CA Pal. Legion of Honor) was woven for the Five Centuries of Tapestry exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, as a demonstration piece. Later tapestries, for example ...
Article
Agate glass
Gordon Campbell
Article
Ahyi, Paul
Christine Mullen Kreamer
(b Jan 25, 1930; d Lomé, Jan 4, 2010).
Togolese painter, sculptor, engraver, stained glass designer, potter and textile designer. Beginning in 1946, he received his secondary education in Dakar, where he also worked in an architecture firm. He travelled to France and received his diplôme supérieur from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. A versatile artist, Ahyi is best known for his murals and for monumental stone, marble and cement public sculptures. His work reflects the fusion of his Togolese roots, European training and an international outlook, and he counts among his influences Moore, Braque, Modigliani, Tamayo, Siqueiros and Tall. His work combines ancient and modern themes and materials, maternity being a prominent topic. The messages of his larger, public pieces operate on a broad level to appeal to the general populace, while smaller works often reflect his private engagement with challenges confronting the human condition. His compositions are both abstract and figurative and evoke the heroism and hope of the two world wars, Togo's colonial period and the struggle for independence from France, as well as the political efforts of the peoples of Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Ahyi has won numerous international prizes, including the prize of the city of Lyon (...
Article
Air-twist
Gordon Campbell
Article
Almorratxa
Gordon Campbell
Article
Alzata
Gordon Campbell
Article
Amberina glass
Gordon Campbell
Type of American glass patented in 1883 by Joseph Locke (1846–1936; head designer of the New England Glass Co.) and Edward Libby (1827–83; owner of the glassworks; see also United States of America §VIII 3.). Amberina glass is usually amber at the bottom, shading to red at the top, but there is also glass in which the colours are reversed (known as ‘reverse amberina’). The effect is created by reheating the top (or, in ‘reverse amberina’, the bottom) of the glass before it has fully cooled.
Amberina glass was soon made at other factories, with or without a licence from the New England Glass Co. Amberina produced by Hobbs, Brockunier & Co. in Wheeling, WV, was made under licence, but the amberina made without a licence by Mt Washington Glass Works of New Bedford, MA, was the subject of litigation that first caused the company to change the name of its glass (to ‘Rose Amber’) and then, in ...
Article
Amelung, John Frederick
Ellen Paul Denker
[Johann Friedrich]
(b Hettlingen, nr Hannover, Germany, June 26, 1741; d Baltimore, MD, Nov 1, 1798).
American glass manufacturer of German birth. He was associated with his brother’s mirror-glass factory in the town of Grünenplan before his venture to make table wares and utility glass in America began in 1784. With backing from investors in Bremen, Germany, Amelung brought 68 glass craftsmen and furnace equipment to the USA. He purchased an existing glasshouse near Frederick, MD, along with 2100 acres. The factory, which he named the New Bremen Glassmanufactory, had been founded by glassmakers from Henry William Stiegel’s defunct operation in Manheim, PA. It was well situated in western Maryland, not far from Baltimore, which offered a fast-growing market. Many settlers in the area were Germans, who were expected to be supportive of the enterprise. During the following decade Amelung built housing for his 400–500 workers. It is believed that he built four glasshouses.
Although Amelung’s craftsmen made window glass, bottles and table glass, the most important group of objects associated with the factory are the high-quality, wheel-engraved presentation pieces (e.g. sugar bowl, ...
Article
Ampulla
Gordon Campbell
[ampul]
Small vessel, usually made of glass, used in ancient Rome and later in the Western church, for holding consecrated oil, or for other sacred uses.
V. Ascani: ‘Ampolla’, Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale, 1 (Rome, 1991), pp. 524–6C. Lambert and P. Pedemonte Demeglio: ‘Ampolle devozionali ed itinerari di pellegrinaggio tra IV e VII secolo’, Antiquité tardive: Revue internationale d’histoire et d’archéologie, 2 (1994), pp. 205–31W. Anderson: ‘An Archaeology of Late Antique Pilgrim Flasks’, Anatolian Studies: Journal of the British Institute at Ankara, 54 (2004), pp. 79–93G. Frank: ‘“Loca Sancta” Souvenirs and the Art of Memory’, Pèlerinages et lieux saints dans l’antiquité et le moyen âge: Mélanges offerts à Pierre Maraval: 2006, ed. B. Caseau, J.-C. Cheynet and V. Déroche (Paris, 2006), pp. 193–201S. Bangert: ‘Menas Ampullae: A Case Study of Long-Distance Contacts’, Incipient Globalization?: Long-Distance Contacts in the Sixth Century, ed. A. Harris, Reading Medieval Studies, 32; Brit. Archaeol. Rep., Int. Ser., 1644 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 27–33...Article
Annealing
Gordon Campbell
Article
Arcimboldo [Arcimboldi], Giuseppe
Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann
(b ?Milan, 1527; d Milan, July 11, 1593).
Italian painter, draughtsman and tapestry designer, active also in Austria and Bohemia. He came from a distinguished Milanese family that included a number of archbishops of the city; his father was the painter Biagio Arcimboldo. Giuseppe is first documented in 1549, working with his father for Milan Cathedral; he received payments until 1558 for supplying paintings, designs for an altar baldacchino and stained-glass windows for the cathedral: the Story of Lot and the Life of St Catherine in the south transept windows are usually attributed to him. He collaborated with Giuseppe Meda in designing the gonfalone of St Ambrose in Milan, probably sometime soon after 1558. In 1556 he received a commission to paint the south wall and vault of the south transept of Monza Cathedral, also in Lombardy, a work that must have been completed by 1562. Portions of a fresco of the Tree of Jesse on the south wall there can be attributed to him. In ...
Article
Alberto di Arnoldo
Elisabetta Scirocco
[Alberto Arnoldi]
(fl 1351–64).
Italian sculptor. Alberto was one of the chief artists in Trecento Florence. His name is first recorded in 1351, when he was paid to work on the marble windows of the campanile of the Cathedral. He is generally ascribed (Becherucci) the rhomboid tiles with bas-reliefs depicting the Seven Sacraments on the second order of the campanile’s north side (originals in Florence, Mus. Opera Duomo). These may have been based on a design by di Maso Banco, who according to some scholars (Kreytenberg, 1979) also sculpted them. In 1355 and 1357–9 Arnoldi was given important jobs, such as the direction of works of the Cathedral with Talenti, Francesco. His only documented works are those he executed for the oratory of the Bigallo in Florence: the life-size statues of the Virgin and Child and the two Angels holding the candelabra on the altar (1359–64), and the sculpted relief depicting the half-length ...
Article
Art Deco
Suzanne Tise
Descriptive term applied to a style of decorative arts that was widely disseminated in Europe and the USA during the 1920s and 1930s. Derived from the style made popular by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, the term has been used only since the late 1960s, when there was a revival of interest in the decorative arts of the early 20th century. Since then the term ‘Art Deco’ has been applied to a wide variety of works produced during the inter-war years, and even to those of the German Bauhaus. But Art Deco was essentially of French origin, and the term should, therefore, be applied only to French works and those from countries directly influenced by France.
The development of the Art Deco style, or the Style moderne as it was called at the time, closely paralleled the initiation of the 1925...
Article
Art Nouveau
Michèle Lavallée
[Fr.: ‘new art’]
Decorative style of the late 19th century and the early 20th that flourished principally in Europe and the USA. Although it influenced painting and sculpture, its chief manifestations were in architecture and the decorative and graphic arts, the aspects on which this survey concentrates. It is characterized by sinuous, asymmetrical lines based on organic forms; in a broader sense it encompasses the geometrical and more abstract patterns and rhythms that were evolved as part of the general reaction to 19th-century historicism. There are wide variations in the style according to where it appeared and the materials that were employed.
Art Nouveau has been held to have had its beginnings in 1894 or 1895. A more appropriate date would be 1884, the year the progressive group Les XX was founded in Belgium, and the term was used in the periodical that supported it, Art Moderne: ‘we are believers in Art Nouveau’. The origin of the name is usually attributed to ...
Article
Arts and Crafts Movement
Alan Crawford
Informal movement in architecture and the decorative arts that championed the unity of the arts, the experience of the individual craftsman, and the qualities of materials and construction in the work itself.
The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in the second half of the 19th century and lasted well into the 20th, drawing its support from progressive artists, architects and designers, philanthropists, amateurs, and middle-class women seeking work in the home. They set up small workshops apart from the world of industry, revived old techniques, and revered the humble household objects of pre-industrial times. The movement was strongest in the industrializing countries of northern Europe and in the USA, and it can best be understood as an unfocused reaction against industrialization. Although quixotic in its anti-industrialism, it was not unique; indeed it was only one among several late 19th-century reform movements, such as the Garden City movement, vegetarianism, and folksong revivals, that set the Romantic values of nature and folk culture against the artificiality of modern life....
Article
Atterbury Glass Company
Gordon Campbell
American glass manufactory. In 1860 James and Thomas Atterbury (the grandsons of Sarah Bakewell, whose brother founded the glass company Bakewell & Co.) joined their brother-in-law James Hale to form the Pittsburgh glass company of Hale, Atterbury and Company. In 1862 Hale was replaced by James Reddick as the company’s glassblower, and the firm became known as Atterbury, Reddick and Company. On Reddick’s departure in ...
Article
Autio, Rudy
Gordon Campbell
(b 1926, Butte, MT; d Missoula, MT June 20, 2007).
American potter and sculptor of Finnish descent who is best known as a figurative ceramicist but has also worked in bronze, concrete, glass and metal. His works are normally in stoneware with incised decorations, but Autio began to work in porcelain while working at the Arabia Porcelain Factory in Helsinki in the 1980s....
Article
Aventurine
Gordon Campbell
Brown glass with golden specks, manufactured in antiquity and rediscovered in the 16th century by the glassmakers of the Venetian island of Murano; the name (It.: avventurina; Venetian: aventurina) implies that its rediscovery was accidental, Aventurine was made by the admixture of copper crystals to molten glass, and was used both for glassware and as a porcelain glaze. A similar effect was subsequently achieved with lacquer. Since the 19th century the term ‘aventurine’ has also been used in a transferred sense to denote a variety of quartz in which the golden specks are pieces of mica....
Article
Baccarat
Liana Paredes-Arend
[Cristallerie de Baccart]
French glassworks. In 1764 Monseigneur de Montmorency-Laval, Bishop of Metz, petitioned Louis XV to have a glassworks built at Baccarat, near Lunéville, in order to make use of his vast forests. The factory was initially directed by Antoine Renault and was called the Verreries de Sainte-Anne because Renault requested permission to build a chapel so that the workers could attend their religious obligations. At first the factory produced soda glass for household and industrial purposes. In 1816 it was purchased by the Belgian manufacturer Aimé-Gabriel D’Artigues (1778–1848), who transferred his Vôneche glassworks near Namur to Baccarat, built a new factory and began the production of lead glass. In 1823 the factory changed its name to the Compagnie des Cristalleries de Baccarat and made plain crystal, opaline, and some alabaster and agate glass. In 1846 Baccarat began producing millefiori glassware and paperweights, followed by paperweights with flowers, fruits or reptiles. From ...
