US museum celebrates glass models by Blaschka artists

The glass artists Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895) and his son Rudolf (1857-1939), who became world-famous for their deceptively realistic models of flowers and marine animals, are being honored posthumously by a museum in the US state of Connecticut with a major exhibition. Until March 2, 2025, the Seaport Museum in the city of Mystic is showing more than 40 of the small glass models, in this case mainly invertebrate marine animals, in the exhibition "Spineless: A Glass Menagerie of Blaschka Marine Invertebrates".

"Spineless" offers a rare opportunity to see the world-famous Blaschka models in a new context, through the lens of marine history and by connecting the past with the present," said Christina Connett Brophy of Mystic Seaport Museum.

Leopold Blaschka was born in Bohemia and later settled in Dresden. Together with his son, he worked as a glass artist and produced thousands of glass models of plants and animals from the 1860s onwards. They could be ordered by catalog and were delivered all over the world. Today, numerous museums and institutions house Blaschka models. One of the most important collections of Blaschka flowers, consisting of several thousand models, can be found in the Natural History Museum of the elite Harvard University in the USA.