"Reproductions of the Christian Glass of the Catacombs": James Jackson Jarves and the Revival of the Art of Glass in Venice

Abstract

IN 1881, THE NEWLY FOUNDED METROPOLITAN Museum of Art received gift of nearly three hundred pieces of Venetian glass ranging in date from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The donor was James Jackson Jarves (1818-1888) of Boston, who gave the collection in memory of his father, Deming Jarves (1790-1869), owner of the Boston-and-Sandwich Glass Company and the Cape Cod Glass Company. An excellent account by Jessie McNab of the collection appeared in 1960 issue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin.' This article singles out group of three nineteenth-century pieces made in imitation of the socalled gold-glass produced in the late Roman period. Jarves himself wrote an introduction to his collection that was published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in February 1882.2 He notes the survival of a sufficient number of old examples to give some idea of the forms, fashions and qualities of the ancient Venetian glass, whilst its other multifarious types are admirably illustrated in the artistic reproductions of the present Salviati and Venezia-Murano companies. The revival of interest in historic Venetian glass began about 1860; Antonio Salviati founded his company in London and Venice in 1866. By the time of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, the full range of historic styles had been developed to include copies of ancient Egyptian, Phoenician, and Roman models as well as the traditional Murano forms of the sixteenth