In Holland the War of Independence does not seem to have interfered with the work of the glass furnaces already established in several of the towns by Altarists or Venetians. M. Schuermans, who has devoted a section of one of his letters to Holland (op. cit., vol. xxix. pp. 147-66), finds traces of the Italians at Bois-le-Duc, Middelburg, Haarlem, and Amsterdam. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century there were already at Amsterdam glass-houses managed by Dutchmen. M. Henri Havard has found in the registers of the States-General mention of two Dutch glass-makers who obtained at this time a privilege for fifteen years to make ‘glasses for Rhine wine in the shape of roemers as well as beer glasses’ by certain new processes (Oud Holland, i. 182). For a time there was an active rivalry between the glass-makers of Amsterdam and Antwerp: at a later period the enterprising LiÉge family of the Bonhommes obtained a footing in several Dutch towns. But, as I have already said, the ‘green glass’ of the Rhine (not always necessarily green or even coloured) was from early times in favour in Holland, if indeed we are not to regard it as indigenous in the country. At a later period there is no doubt that most of the finer specimens were made there. It is glasses of this class, roemers in the first place, but also tall ‘flutes,’ that we see so often in the works of the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. Those of a Venetian type, on the other hand, though by no means absent, are much rarer than in the contemporary paintings of the Flemish school.

The Dutch seem above all to have esteemed the ruimer or roemer; on glasses of this shape the finest engraving and diamond-scratching were expended, and it was these glasses that they selected to mount on tall silver stands of elaborate workmanship. There are the bekerschroeven (beaker-screws), which may at times be seen on the buffet in a seventeenth-century Dutch interior. There are several fine examples of these trophy-like arrangements in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam.

For us, seeing that we must confine ourselves to points of real artistic interest or historical significance, the glass made by the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is of importance mainly under these two aspects: 1. That here the art of engraving, or rather scratching, with the diamond was carried to greater perfection than in any other country. 2. That starting from the close of the seventeenth century, the forms and methods of construction of the Dutch drinking-glasses (apart from the roemer) first greatly influenced, and then in turn were influenced by, our English glasses.

As in Germany, where the Emperor Ferdinand III. learned the art, drawing with the diamond on glass was in Holland practised as an elegant accomplishment by people in good position, and above all by ladies. Indeed we are here brought into contact with a cultured literary set, a coterie of which the members held a higher social, and perhaps intellectual, position than we can allow to the majority of the great painters of the day whose names are better known to us. Typical frequenters of this circle were the three sisters, daughters of Roemer Vischer, who were immortalised in the songs of Huyghens, Cats, and Hooft (Don Henriques de Castro, ‘Een en ander over Glasgravure,’ Oud Holland, i. 286; see also Hartshorne, p. 48). A still more famous literary lady was Anna Maria van Schurman, who among so many other accomplishments had, as Cats has recorded, mastered the art ‘met een diamant op het glas gheestigh to schrijven.’^[224] Several good examples of the work of these ladies, which took the form for the most part of mottoes engraved with scrolls and flourishes on the bowls of roemers, are preserved in the Rijks Museum: some of these have been admirably reproduced by Mr. Hartshorne in his work on English glasses.^[225]

Another interesting class of diamond-scratched Dutch glass is well represented in the British Museum. Here we find portraits of contemporary celebrities, of members of the house of Orange in many cases, together with coats-of-arms, scratched on the bowls of wine-glasses—either conical glasses of Venetian forms or tall narrow ‘flutes.’ Sometimes, indeed, designs of this character are found on winged glasses of purely Venetian type. Mr. Nesbitt was of opinion that these were made in Venice (Slade Catalogue, No. 891), but we now know, thanks to M. Schuermans’ researches, that such glasses may well have been produced at this time in the north. The similarity in form of the bulbs or knops on the stems of all the glasses of this series should be noted: in no case is there any trace of cutting with the wheel on this part, still less of any facetting. On a thin funnel-shaped glass (Slade, No. 889) we have on one side the arms of England and Orange-Nassau impaled, on the other is a portrait of a lady in the costume of the middle of the seventeenth century, doubtless the ‘counterfeit’ of Mary, Princess of Orange, the daughter of Charles I. It is to her that we must refer the inscription in Gothic letters, ‘Het Welvaren Van De Princes.’ In these Dutch glasses scratched with the diamond may be found perhaps the earliest instances of glasses ‘that have been made to speak.’

Of quite another nature were the elaborate compositions engraved for the most part with the wheel upon plates of glass. It was to work of this kind that Gerard Dou was brought up by his father—himself ‘a glass-worker and writer on glass,’ and subsequently master of the glass-makers’ guild at Leyden. The younger Dou was apprenticed to one Dolendo, who is described as ‘a right good plate-etcher,’ before he entered the studio of Rembrandt (Martin, Gerard Dou, pp. 28-29).

There came into fashion in Holland in the next century a method of engraving on glass, if engraving it can be called, of quite a different nature. This is the stipple or dotted method, the stip of the Dutch, by which a design of the utmost delicacy—a mere breath, as it were—is made to appear on the surface of the glass. When examined with a glass the decoration is seen to be built up of minute dots as in a stipple engraving,^[226] differing from the latter, however, in this, that in the case of the work on the glass, the lights are given by the dots and the clear untouched ground represents the shadow.

One of the earliest masters, if not the inventor of this method, was Frans Greenwood, who appears indeed to have worked with the wheel also. Greenwood—his name would point to an English extraction—was born at Rotterdam in 1680, and the latest date found on his engraved work is 1743. There is in the British Museum a wine-glass with a Bacchic subject, a highly finished example of this pointillÉ process, signed ‘F. Greenwood f^t.’ In the eighteenth century this stippling on glass was practised by painters of some note. Thus there are two glasses in the Rijks Museum (dated 1750 and 1751) both stippled with portrait heads, which bear the signature of Aart Schouman, a portrait-painter of repute at the time. But the greatest master of the art was Wolf, an eccentric genius who lived at the Hague. We know little of him except that he married in 1787, and died young in 1808. Glasses stippled with graceful designs by this master, somewhat in the manner of Bartolozzi, are perhaps less rare than those of Greenwood or Schouman. Some of his engravings are found upon goblets of flint glass with facetted stems, of English make, probably. On an example of his work in the British Museum a graceful female figure bears a scroll with the words, ‘Werken van het genootschap. K.W.D.A.V.’

The tradition of Wolf was carried on by Daniel Henriques de Castro, who died as late as 1862. The son of the latter artist, in an article on the subject in the first volume of Oud Holland, has collected some traditions bearing on the methods of execution of this now lost process. The author relates how he had come across an old man who had watched Wolf while at work on one of his glasses; according to his report, his only tools were an etching-needle and a small hammer. This is a matter of some importance, as both the late Mr. Nesbitt and Mr. Hartshorne appear to have taken it for granted that this delicate film-like engraving was produced, in part at least, by means of acid. But the two processes can hardly have been combined, and the effect is quite unlike that produced when the surface of glass is eaten away by hydrofluoric acid. It would, indeed, be quite impossible to produce such delicate work by any etching process of this latter kind.^[227]

I shall have something to say of the Dutch wine-glasses of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when I come to speak of the English glasses that were in a measure founded on them. Suffice to mention that already, before the end of the seventeenth century, we find on these glasses the welted foot and the baluster stem moulded and uncut, enclosing one or more ‘tears’—forms that somewhat later passed over to England.