Realgar Glass: Learning from the Archive, the Lab, and the Hot Shop
A lecture by Julie Bellemare (BGC PhD ’21; The Corning Museum of Glass)

Since 2019, the Corning Museum of Glass has been investigating its realgar-colored glass objects. A Chinese innovation, this red-and-orange glass was developed in the early decades of the eighteenth century and used at the Qing imperial glassworks to create a range of vessels—but the secret to its making was subsequently lost. The presence of a broken snuff bottle in the museum’s collection enabled more extensive scientific testing to understand the precise chemical composition of this glass. Armed with this recipe, materials scientists batched and re-created this historical glass in the lab. Most recently, the museum’s hot glass team used this new glass in wood-burning and gas furnaces. These experiments revealed the importance of heat control and rapid cooling to the creation of different hues in the same glass object, providing insights into how eighteenth-century glassblowers might have worked with this unique material. As part of this ongoing project, the museum is considering the effects of mold-blowing on colors and patterns and exploring cold-working techniques. Supplemented by archival findings, this presentation will report on the knowledge gained from the re-creation of realgar glass in the lab and in the hot shop, arguing for the importance of these research methods to art historical inquiry.

An alumni spotlight lecture.

May 13 at 6pm
38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall