Gardner

The Glass of Frederick Carder by Paul V. Gardner

p. 73-74 – Intarsia

The Intarsia glass made at Steuben in the late 1920s and early 1930s was considered by Carder to be his greatest achievement in artistic glassmaking. The name was robably adapted from intarsiatura, a type of fifteenth-century Italian marquetry or inlaying. In 1960, Carder recalled that he had experimented with a type of Intarsia about 1916 or 1917, but did no commercial productions until 1920 or 1921. He said this type of Intarsia was done by laying out the colored design in fragments on the marver. These were picked up on the parison and covered with a layer of clear colorless glass before being formed into the finished object. Up to the present time, no documented pieces made by this technique have come to light.

The Intarsia pieces made about 1930 usually range from about one-sixteenth to one-eighth inch in thickness and are in reality three ayers of glass: two colorless crystal glass layers encasing a layer of colored glass that forms the ornamental design.

To achieve this effect, an elongated parison of crystal glass varying with the size of the piece desired, but averaging about 3 inches long by 1 1/2 inches in diameter for a 6- to 8-inch vase, as cased while molten with a thin layer of colored glass. The two-layered gather was cooled, and a design etched through reheated and covered with another layer of clear glass.

Next, the triple layered bubble was expanded and worked, usually into a vase or bowl, by offhand blowing The result was a fusion of the three thin layers of glass into a homogeneous layer, usuallyl from one-eighth to one-sixteenth inch in total thickness. The more the piece was blown out or worked, the thinner the layers became and the lighter the color of the design.