Mr. Rudolph Blaschka, the artist who with his father, modeled the famous "glass flowers" in the University Botanical Museum, has begun work on a supplementary collection of glass models of grasses and sedges, which will be displayed on their completion in a room adjoining the Ware collection of glass flowers.
Funds for the first half-year have already gone forward to the artist, and Mr. Walter Deane '70 formerly president of the New England Botanical Club, has consented to aid in providing him with American material for the construction of the new models.
The Ware collection now on exhibition will be practically complete when twenty models and fifty magnified anatomical details, now in the artist's studio in Germany, have been transported to this country. Under existing conditions it is unsafe to transport them, especially as their removal "in bond" to Boston cannot yet be secured. Up to the time of the war, the glass flowers were shipped direct to Boston and then by the courtesy of the Custom House officials were carried directly to the Museum in Cambridge and were unpacked safely at the University.
The collection now illustrates 160 families of flowering plants, 540 genera, and 803 species, and there are more than 3200 analytical magnified details. The range of the exhibition is sufficiently extensive to give a clear idea of the relations of these important families and species to each other. The inimitable skill which has copied in glass every minute detail of structure of the plants has been wholly devoted to the University. All of the specimens which have been made since 1895 are the artistic handiwork of Mr. Blaschka, who has carried on all of his study and his modeling single-handed in his studio in Germany.
Read more in News
TO GIVE LECTURES ON NEAR EAST