This exhibition looks at glass and fragrance in Asia through the millennia-long relationships between glass, perfumery, and the storage of scent – and the link between glass and fragrance in Asia. Presenting vessels from Ancient Egypt and Rome to those designed by contemporary artists, as well as a selection of glass ware from China, India, and Japan. The curator of the exhibition, Julie Bellemare, explains that the exhibition was an opportunity to explore why glass and scent became inextricably linked, and why glass continues to be the material of choice for vessels holding perfume millennia later, as these objects hold important cultural histories, providing a lens through which to understand topics as varied as the history of medicine, the advent of chemistry, and global cultural and trade exchange.
From the very beginnings of glassmaking, glass vessels have been created to hold and diffuse fragrance. The material’s unique properties – impermeability, inertness, and beauty – make it particularly suited to the purpose of encapsulating a substance as fleeting and precious as scent. In Ancient Egypt and Rome, small glass containers were shaped for unguents and perfumes. In the Islamic world, glass was thinly blown into elegant sprinklers to welcome guests with rosewater. Early modern forays into Asia enabled the Dutch to infuse oils with Indonesian spices and store them in beautifully gilded and enamelled vessels, and in 19th-century Europe, advances in chemistry led to a new wave of iconic fragrances, inseparable from the glass bottles that have now become synonymous with luxury perfume industry.
In addition to showing the evolution of perfume bottles over time, stand-alone displays help illustrate four distinct stories. The first case features rosewater sprinklers, notable for their bulbous bodies and long narrow necks, uniquely suited to control the flow of the precious and expensive liquid. The highly fragrant Damascus rose was once an exotic and rare flower to European consumers, necessitating specialised glass vessels to cater to its uses as demand spread across the Mediterranean.
In this exhibition of glass and fragrance in Asia, a pair of small, gilded, bottles made in northern India in the 19th century have been largely overlooked until now, but these vials’ small size and floral decoration hints at their function as perfume bottles. In India, perfume is known as attar, a heady mix of flowers, herbs, spices, and other natural materials in a base of sandalwood oil (rather than alcohol). Perfume makers in Kannauj, in Uttar Pradesh, northern India, have been producing attar for over 400 years, predating the French perfume industry. The area on the banks of the Ganges is perfect for the cultivation of roses along with other plants introduced from Iran and Central Asia.
Visitors are also able to smell four spiced oils inspired by this pair of attar bottles – a boxed set of four flasks which likely contained aromatic oils infused with precious spices from Sri Lanka and Indonesia: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and mace. In the 1600s and 1700s, Dutch merchants bottled up expensive oils infused with these aromatic spices in richly decorated flasks and gifted them to local rulers and trade partners along the Indian Ocean.
The second case in the exhibition exploring glass and fragrance in Asia highlights the snuff trade between Europe and China in the 18th century, when highly portable glass objects stimulated the development of new Chinese glassmaking techniques, such as aventurine and gold-ruby glass. Also critical to this narrative are the objects needed to create and distil scent. Alongside a rare 16th-century illustrated book on distillation from the museum’s Rakow Research Library, this section of the exhibition also explores glass as a tool for creating perfume in addition to containing fragrance.
Another display is dedicated to snuff bottles, which also tells a global glass story. Snuff is powdered tobacco leaves mixed with aromatics, such as jasmine or orange flower. Tobacco originated in South America and was first introduced to Europe in the 1500s and later to China. Originally, Chinese snuff bottles were created to perform a specific function: the storage of ground tobacco. Smoking tobacco was illegal, but the use of snuff was allowed because it was considered a remedy for common illnesses such as colds and headaches. They began making their appearance in the early 18th century, during the reign of the Kangxi emperor (1654-1722) with the earliest bottles made out of glass. The portable snuff boxes that Europeans gifted to Chinese officials often contained glass and stimulated the development of new glass types in China, such as aventurine and gold-ruby glass.
The first palace glass workshop was set up in 1696 by order of the Kangxi emperor (r 1662-1722) and was run by a German Jesuit priest called Kilian Stumpf, a skilled glassmaker. Under his guidance, the workshops began to make objects such as vases, cups, bowls, snuff bottles, and incense burners, as well as items for the scholar’s desk. These objects were either destined for use in the palace, or given as gifts by the emperor. Most of the craftsmen were Chinese with glass-making or jade-working experience and came from Shandong in northwest China, or from Guandong and Suzhou in the south. European Jesuits with glass-making skills also worked in the palace workshops in the 1740s and 1750s.
The 18th- and 19th-century trade in scented substances therefore accelerated the global exchange of glass techniques. Many bottles are completely devoid of decoration, however, like many other Chinese art forms, the Chinese snuff bottles were often decorated using symbols. Various images were used to create homonyms and puns through characters and/or visuals to convey a wish or auspicious theme, such as longevity (shou, of a crane, pine tree, or images of the eight immortals), happiness or blessings (fu, or bat image), and abundance. The fish is both an emblem of wealth and abundance and of harmony and married bliss and is used in a variety of decorative ways in many media. Bamboo is also a frequent motif, owing to its durability and being evergreen, to signify longevity.
These symbols were derived from a multitude of sources such as legends, history, religion, philosophy, and superstition. The ideas used are almost always directed toward bringing wealth, health, good luck, longevity, even immortality to the owner of an artefact, frequently as a wish expressed in a kind of coded form by the giver of a gift.
A final case will consider the importance of glass in containing medicinals, which could be quite pungent, particularly, the stimulating effects of smelling salts, which contained ammonium carbonate, which could be used to revive a person who had lost consciousness. Their containers were designed for portability, and the glass tinted to protect its contents from sunlight.
In many cultures, the flowers, herbs, and spices from which perfumes were extracted also had medicinal properties. Airtight glass bottles ensured that these substances remained potent over time, and smaller flasks were designed for portability. One example in the exhibition is a small, cut-glass medicine bottle that was originally labelled with the Japanese characters for peppermint oil (hakka-yu). Often, in East Asian cultures, peppermint was used to treat colds, joint pains, and to relieve insect stings.
In the 19th century, there was a significant difference between Japanese and European glass-cutting techniques. European glassmakers cut with a rotating disc but the Japanese used an emery mixed with water, applied in a backwards and forwards motion with an iron-rod type tool. It was a laborious process but produced a finish that was smooth to the touch. Finished products known as tebori kiriko, ‘hand-carved cut glass’ commanded a high price. By the early 19th century, as practising glassmakers became more professional – and commercial – glass production grew, for example, Kyushu had a thriving local industry that retained its distinctive identity. Edo manufactures also became famous for glassware, producing such items as cut-glass sake glasses.
During the Meiji period (1868-1912), as part of the government’s policy of promoting Japanese industrialisation, a modern glass factory was established and in 1881, the government invited Emmanuel Hauptmann, a British cutglass engineer, to Japan to impart his knowledge and techniques to the Edo kiriko artisans, which led to British cut glass technology merging with Edo kiriko techniques. Another famous cut-glass style, Satsuma kiriko, stopped its production at the end of the 19th century, resulting in many unemployed craftsmen migrating to Edo, taking with them their Satsuma kiriko traditions. This technique of using colour coated glass was soon absorbed into the production of Edo kiriko. From the Taisho period (1912-1926) through the early days of the Showa period (1926-1988), cut glass became to be known as wa glass (Japanese-style glass). This style became extremely popular in Japan and was used for drinking glasses, tableware, and even lamp shades and is still in use today.
From 7 September to 1 February, 2025, The Corning Museum of Glass, home.cmog.org
The museum’s 62nd Annual Seminar on Glass will be presented as a free live Zoom event on 22-23 October, convening scholars, artists, and perfumers to consider the intimate relationship between glass and scent across history. Seminar programming will include a keynote presentation on 20th-century perfume bottles, papers on subjects as diverse as the trade of balsam in the ancient world, the evolution of Islamic rosewater sprinklers, and the modern perfume bottles created by René Lalique.
