"Glass can be decorative or utilitarian, and its forms often reflect technological innovations and social change. Drawing on an insightful selection from the Yale University Art Gallery and other collections at Yale, American Glass illuminates the vital and often intimate roles that glass has played in the nation's art and culture. Spectacularly illustrated, the publication showcases eighteenth-century mold-blown vessels, nineteenth-century pressed glass, innovative studio work, and luminous stained-glass windows by John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany, the latter reproduced as a lush gatefold. These are considered alongside beguiling objects that broaden our expectations of glass and speak to the centrality of the medium in American life, including one of the oldest complex microscopes in the United States, an early Edison light bulb, glass-plate photography, jewelry, and more. With an essay on the history of collecting American glass and discussions of each object that present new scholarship, this engaging book tells the long and rich history of glass in America--from prehistoric minerals to contemporary sculptures"--Dust jacket front flap.

Reference to types of glass and the history of numerous glass houses.

Glass is one of the world's oldest materials for art and, in America, one of the newest. In the United States in the last 30 years, glass has emerged as a vital component of America's visual arts. Glass, basically sand melted to a liquid with the consistency of honey, can be blown into fragile bubbles, cast into sculptural architectural components, fused, painted, carved, and engraved, to name only a few techniques in the glass artist's vocabulary. This survey includes recent examples of art in glass by 13 artists selected from more than a thousand in the United States. They follow no single trend or tradition but draw freely from the world and its visual history. Whether their art takes inspiration from Egyptian canopic jars, medieval stained-glass windows, or Venetian glass techniques, American artists working in glass use the world for their sketchbooks and are masters of their art.

Murano Glass and its Collectors in Aesthetic America / Melody Barnett Deusner -- Venetian Mosaics and Glass in the United States, 1860-1917 / Sheldon Barr -- "Where Have Titian's Beauties Gone?" : Sargent and Whistler on the Streets of Venice / Stephanie Mayer Heydt -- Interweaving Worlds : Antique and Revival Lace in Italy and in the United States, 1872-1927 / Diana Jocelyn Greenwold -- Sparks of Genius : American Art and the Appeal of Modern Venetian Glass / Crawford Alexander Mann III -- Biographies / Brittany Emens Strupp, Crawford Alexander Mann III.

American glassmaking became a popular industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the population expanded and demanded pretty decorative goods to reflect their growing affluence. This new book presents over 500 pretty, American-made glass bells identified by their type of bell, producer, and period; and with descriptions that include their size, color, decoration or pattern, and range of values. Each bell is shown in beautiful color photography. Chapters focus on American art glass, cut glass, blown, pressed, and lampwork glass bells. Bell collectors, historians, museum curators, and glass lovers all will find this an important reference for their libraries.