A colorful, carefully arranged design, a moment of vision, is forever fixed under glass. It is difficult to imagine a better metaphor for the ideas of permanence and objectivity, and yet the very dome that captures this vision and invites our scrutiny also distorts and magnifies what we see, teasing our sight as the globe is turned and examined. Part of the wonder of such an object might be the puzzle it presents: is it a kind of laboratory bell-jar, preserving some beautiful specimen of nature for analysis, or is it like a child's soap bubble, conjuring momentary flights of the imagination?
from the chapter “The Classic Period”
Since their invention in the last century, spherical glass paperweights have fascinated viewer and collector alike. This book is an introduction to the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, which includes over fourteen hundred paperweights in the Arthur Rubloff Collection, one of the finest in the world. Over 130 illustrations capture the mystery and beauty of numerous paperweights produced in the French factories of the “classic period,” as well as renowned American, Bohemian, and English, and Venetian examples. Also illustrated are ancient and nineteenth-century objects made with similar glassmaking techniques and a fine selection from the “paperweight renaissance” of the twentieth century.
Geraldine Casper is former curator at the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum in Neenah, Wisconsin, which houses the Evangeline Bergstrom Collection of paperweights.