by Courtney Mattison
After Leopold Blaschka – a glass flame worker from the Czech Republic – lost his wife and father in the early 1850’s, he took time off to grieve and sail to America. Without a steam engine to speed their journey, Leopold and his shipmates found themselves becalmed for two weeks in the Azores off the coast of Portugal in a twist of fate that is still making ripples today. Leopold had never before witnessed the glasslike transparency of living marine invertebrates and began collecting and drawing the fragile jellyfish and other creatures that populated the surrounding waters.
Ten years later, as a successful botanical glass artisan living in Dresden, Leopold was commissioned to create a dozen glass sea anemones for the local museum of zoology, giving him the opportunity to put his inspiration from that auspicious voyage to work.…