preview

Gro Viking Museum

Decent Essays

In 2007 Milwaukee School of Engineering opened the Grohmann Museum named after Dr. Eckhart Grohmann, an art collector that donated his collection to the Milwaukee School of Engineering. The museum is home to many pieces of art mainly consisting of paintings. The Grohmann Museum focuses almost entirely on the evolution of human work. I found three particular paintings on glass blowing interesting; “Glass Blowing Workshop” by Anders Montan, “Interior of Glass Works” by Magnus Zellar, and “The Glass Blowers In Incheville” by Marie Francois Firmin-Girard. The three paintings are all done in oil on canvas and well represent glass blowing over time.
The first painting, “Glass Blowing Workshop” by Anders Montan, depicts a Glass Blowing Workshop, hence …show more content…

This I take to assume is a precaution to avoid setting fire to anything while it is not in use although it could also be to keep it hot inside. Regardless, I wouldn’t expect to see that in a workshop more than one hundred years old. Another interesting thing is that the furnace is made of brick. when I think of an oven or furnace I think of the super advanced ovens we use today which probably use special heat resisting material but I suppose that wouldn’t exist at the time so brick makes sense. Towards the bottom right of the painting, there is a man blowing a piece of glass. Next to that man is a little boy observing the glass blowing. The rest of the factory is filled with similar scenery. One interesting piece would be that there are little children in this factory, and not just on a special school field trip, they are working with the glass blowers and one of the seemingly older children is even the one doing the glass blowing while the glass blower looks like he is helping him. But why are there children in the factory they should be in school, this is probably due to the fact that school probably wasn’t free yet. However, it is understandable that the kids may not …show more content…

This time, the furnace for heating the glass is located in the middle of the painting. However, now, there are two men on each side of the furnace heating up some glass on one of the metal glass holding sticks. What’s interesting though is that both of them use absolutely no protection against heat. They even have their sleeves rolled up. What confuses me is that they are holding a metal rod directly into heat instead of with gloves and with my experience with holding a piece of metal to heat in electronic circuit building, it hurts. The painting, like the last, has furnace cover doors, brick furnace, and the same children present situation. Right below the furnace, there are two baskets, one filled with red glass shards and one filled with blue glass shards which at first glimpse I thought was the finished product until I took a closer look and saw that they did not resemble glass works but instead broken pieces of glass. This intrigued me because I would not have expected people from a hundred years ago to be thinking about saving material. Most of the glass shard are probably leftover material cut off during the process of making the glass product but maybe it is also old and

Get Access