Collector's Insights

Bertil Vallien: The Miniature Heads and Paperweight Designs
Bertil Vallien: The Miniature Heads and Paperweight Designs Bertil Vallien is best known internationally for his large sand-cast boat sculptures, but a significant and often overlooked dimension of his work at Kosta Boda was his production of smaller cast glass objects: miniature heads, figures, and paperweight forms that brought his symbolic vocabulary into an accessible and collectible scale. These pieces were not minor works produced to fill a commercial gap; they were extensions of the same artistic concerns that drove his monumental sculpture, translated into a format that allowed a... Read more...
Orrefors Graal and Ariel Glass: Development, Designers and Technique
Orrefors Graal and Ariel Glass: Development, Designers and Technique The Graal and Ariel techniques are the two most technically significant innovations in the history of Orrefors, and they are among the most important developments in the broader history of twentieth-century glass. Both techniques involve encasing decorated glass within a gather of clear crystal, creating objects in which the decoration is internal rather than surface-applied, visible through the outer layer but separated from it. The visual effects produced by both techniques are unlike those of any other glass process, and the... Read more...
Simon Gate: Designer at Orrefors
Simon Gate: Designer at Orrefors Simon Gate was the first trained artist to join Orrefors, and his appointment in 1916 marked the beginning of the factory's transformation into a producer of serious art glass. Gate brought to Orrefors a command of figurative composition rooted in academic painting, and he applied that command to engraved glass with a rigour and ambition that set the standard for everything that followed. His work established the classical vocabulary of Swedish art glass: monumental figures, mythological narrative, deep engraving in clear crystal, and a formal... Read more...
Vicke Lindstrand: Designer at Orrefors and Kosta
Vicke Lindstrand: Designer at Orrefors and Kosta Vicke Lindstrand was one of the most technically versatile and artistically adventurous designers in the history of Swedish glass. His career spanned four decades and two of the most significant glassworks in Sweden, Orrefors and Kosta, and across that period he produced engraved glass, Graal pieces, Ariel glass, and free-blown forms that demonstrated an exceptional range of creative ambition. Where Simon Gate had established the classical vocabulary of Swedish art glass and Edward Hald had brought wit and decorative lightness to the tradition,... Read more...
Sven Palmqvist: Designer at Orrefors
Sven Palmqvist: Designer at Orrefors Sven Palmqvist was the most technically inventive designer in the history of Orrefors. His career at the factory spanned four decades, from his arrival in 1928 to his retirement in the late 1960s, and across that period he developed two entirely new glassmaking techniques, the Ravenna technique and the Fuga technique, that extended the expressive possibilities of the medium in ways that no other designer at the factory had achieved. Palmqvist understood glass as a material with physical properties that could be investigated and exploited,... Read more...
Edward Hald: Designer at Orrefors
Edward Hald: Designer at Orrefors Edward Hald was one of the two artists who transformed Orrefors from a provincial Swedish glassworks into an internationally recognised centre of glass art. His career at Orrefors spanned more than five decades, from his appointment in 1917 to his retirement in the 1970s, and across that period he produced work in engraved glass, Graal glass, and production design that demonstrated an unusually wide range of technical and aesthetic command. Hald brought to glass a sensibility formed by painting and by direct exposure to the... Read more...
Bertil Vallien: Designer at Kosta Boda
Bertil Vallien: Designer at Kosta Boda Bertil Vallien is the most internationally recognised Swedish glass artist of the late twentieth century. His career at Kosta Boda, which began in 1963 and extended well into the twenty-first century, produced a body of work that moved from production design and decorative glass through to large-scale sculpture and the development of sand casting as a serious artistic technique. Vallien's sand-cast boat series, begun in the 1980s, became one of the defining bodies of work in international studio glass, and his influence on the... Read more...
René Lalique: From Jewellery to Glass — A Collector's Guide
Part of The Wonder Room's series on Art Nouveau & Art Deco Glass. Read the pillar guide for the full historical and design context. Introduction René Lalique is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of the decorative arts, a man who achieved mastery in not one but two entirely different fields, and who in his second career produced a body of work so distinctive and so widely admired that his name has become synonymous with a particular quality of glass. He was, first, the greatest jeweller of... Read more...
Montjoye & Legras: The Forgotten Houses of French Art Glass — A Collector's Guide
Part of The Wonder Room's series on Art Nouveau & Art Deco Glass. Read the pillar guide for the full historical and design context. Introduction In the shadow of Gallé, Daum, and Lalique, a number of French glasshouses produced Art Nouveau glass of genuine quality that has been consistently undervalued by the market, and consistently rewarding for the collectors who have taken the trouble to understand it. Among these, Montjoye and Legras stand out as the most significant: studios whose output, at its best, approaches the quality of the great... Read more...
Orrefors: Art, Engraving, and Scandinavian Modernism — A Collector's Guide
Part of The Wonder Room's series on Studio & Decorative Art Glass. Read the pillar guide for an introduction to forms, techniques, and movements. Introduction If Holmegaard represents the humanist warmth of Scandinavian glass and Kosta its experimental breadth, Orrefors represents its highest formal ambition. No other glassworks in the world has elevated engraving to such a level of artistic achievement; no other studio has produced a body of work in which the glass itself, its clarity, its weight, its capacity to hold and transmit light, is so completely at... Read more...
Louis Comfort Tiffany: Favrile Glass and the American Vision — A Collector's Guide
Part of The Wonder Room's series on Art Nouveau & Art Deco Glass. Read the pillar guide for the full historical and design context. Introduction Louis Comfort Tiffany is the most celebrated name in American decorative art, a designer of extraordinary range and ambition whose work in glass transformed the medium and created objects that remain, more than a century after they were made, among the most recognisable and most desired in the world. His leaded glass lamps, the dragonfly, the wisteria, the peony, the magnolia, have achieved a cultural... Read more...
Kosta: Sweden's Oldest Glassworks — A Collector's Guide
Part of The Wonder Room's series on Studio & Decorative Art Glass. Read the pillar guide for an introduction to forms, techniques, and movements. Introduction Kosta is Sweden's oldest glassworks, founded in 1742 in the forested region of Småland, a landscape of lakes, pine forests, and small communities whose identity has been shaped by glass for nearly three centuries. It is also one of the most creatively varied: across its long history, Kosta has produced work ranging from the classically refined to the boldly experimental, and its roster of designers... Read more...