Under the title “Unusual glassware”, the temporary exhibition at the Sorèze Glass Museum offers a variety of curiosities this year.
The new temporary exhibition at the Glass Museum, “Unusual glassware”, presents bizarre and amusing glassware that is useful in decoration, practical life or science. And all these objects are surprising to say the least, with bizarre shapes of course, but sometimes adapted to a very specific use.
Following the work of Lavoisier and the Arsenal group, a whole section of glass craftsmanship was devoted to the production of austere glassware, often called “laboratory” glassware, at the request of chemical or physicist researchers, which has led to extraordinary scientific advances. This is how this exhibition reveals, for example, the first “Leclanché” batteries. On this side, it is not the bizarre shapes that are lacking. Nowadays, there are glassmakers in certain laboratories who make on demand, in an emergency, often after accidental breakage, all types of precise and specific parts to allow chemists to continue their experiments. In cane-blown artistic glassware, there is also something bizarre and ingenious: glass eye prostheses and, under the generic name of “screwed up” and to say the least astounding, daggers, swords, canes and bugles blown by extremely talented glassmakers of the 19th century. Perhaps most surprising is the collection of uraline whose uranium salts in very small, completely harmless quantities allow it to glow with a fluorescent light that varies from yellow to green when placed under a lamp. And still the usual collections.