Although glass has been known in China for around two and a half thousand years, it led a shadowy existence for a long time—unlike in the Middle East and Europe. In the late seventeenth century, Jesuit scholars, who advised the Beijing court on topics such as astronomy, calendar science, and European painting techniques, were commissioned to set up an imperial glassworks. Subsequently, a glass art based on European technology but stylistically quite independent and strongly following Chinese aesthetics developed there. Under Emperor Qianlong (reign 1736–1795), this so-called “Peking glass” enjoyed its golden age, and it continued to be produced into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this late phase, the multicolored so-called overlay glass from China in particular found a clear echo in European Art Nouveau, for example in the work of Émile Gallé, who is known to have studied Chinese glass closely.

The vase shown here, which is one of a pair of vases from the museum’s Peking glass collection, dates from this relatively late phase. The vessel, made in two layers with a slender, long neck over a flattened spherical body, impresses with its simple yet classical and elegant design. Its design principles are reminiscent of the zenith of this art in the eighteenth century.

At the same time, monochrome Peking glass, like the piece presented here, gives the impression of an anticipation of the Bauhaus aesthetic in Europe. The astonishingly modern impact of such shapes may also have been one of the motivating factors behind the repeated appearance of Chinese imitations on the international art market in the first half of the twentieth century.

With around one hundred pieces, the Museum Angewandte Kunst’s Peking glass collection is the most extensive and highest-quality museum collection in Germany.