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.

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Julie Bellemare joined the Corning Museum of Glass as curator of early modern glass in 2022. In this role, she is responsible for stewarding, researching, and expanding the museum’s collection of glass produced between 1250 and 1825. Specializing in Chinese enamels and glass, she holds a PhD in decorative arts, design history, material culture from Bard Graduate Center and a master’s in the history of art and visual culture from the University of Oxford. She has also held research positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Asian Art and the Brooklyn Museum and has published widely on global decorative arts of the eighteenth century.