The Harvard Museum of Natural History
Hand-lamped glass botanical models, over four thousand of them, made by a single father-son workshop across fifty years.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Boston follows Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father-son team of Bohemian glassworkers who spent fifty years in a rented house outside Dresden making botanical models for a Harvard professor who wanted teaching specimens that would never rot. It traces their glassworking methods, Rudolf's field trips to sketch live plants, and the greenhouses Harvard stocked so they could grow what they copied. No one in the family ever learned exactly how they worked, and neither wrote it down.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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