Written by Julian Carter, Principal Conservator Natural Sciences, Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, Cardiff

During the late 19th century, Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895) and his son Rudolf (1857-1929) produced thousands of beautifully detailed glass models of a wide range of sea creatures, and other animals, for natural history museums and aquaria all over the world. The work has since been hailed as “an artistic marvel in the field of science and a scientific marvel in the field of art”. The work of the Blaschka’s remains remarkably contemporary today, working as they did on the cusp of design, craft, and industry. Crossing the boundaries of science and art, the surviving models today have a value that makes them irreplaceable. 

The idea for making lifelike renditions of sea creatures out of glass arose from the difficulty of preserving and displaying soft-bodied animals such as jellyfish, marine worms, and sea anemones. Preserving such animals in a lifelike way is difficult as techniques such as fluid preservation cause colours to quickly fade and shapes to become distorted. Leopold Blaschka devised a solution to this problem by using his glass working skills to accurately model these animals out of glass and other materials available to him and went on to establish a successful business supplying glass models to museums worldwide during the latter half of the 19th century.