Retirement

In Victor Arwas’ treatise, Glass Art Nouveau to Art Deco, the author traces Carder’s retirement.

(p. 295) “Carder’s retirement at the age of seventy-one proved an active one. Alone in his workshop he experimented with glass casts, producing a variety of bowls, plaques and shallow plates with relief decoration, made from clear crystal. To achieve the clearest results he used the cire-perdue process, which entailed producing a wax model of the desired object, then covering it with a plaster and clay paste which hardened to form a mould. The base was pierced and the whole then heated until the wax melted and was ‘lost’ down the holes. The hollow mould could then be filled with the molten glass. When the glass sculpture was formed and cooled, the mould could be broken away to reveal the finished object. Cast as a unique object, there were none of the mould marks left when a repeatable investment was used.

Carder sometimes substituted a paste of ground coloured glass with a binding agent for the molten glass, and produced several items in pate-de-verre. In the 1940s he began to work in the round, producing a number of clear glass busts portraits, figures and animals, later using coloured glass.

“At the age of eighty-seven, Carder began working on his most intricate and complex achievements, using the diatreta technique. With the cire-perdue method of casting, he produced a number of vases in clear crystal and coloured glass encased in a sculpted wall made up of human figures, with masks or ornamental latticework connected to the main body of the vase only at the top and bottom. Carder performed the entire operation himself, including the designing, modeling, casting, firing and breaking of the mould.

“Carder finally closed down his workshop in 1959, and died in 1963 at the age of 100. He had lived through the most fecund period of creativity in Victorian England, worked with John Northwood and all other great English cameo glass workmen, had worked with Carl Faberge, met Emile Galle, Rene Lalique and Louis Comfort Tiffany and as a member of the Hoover Commission at the 1925 Paris International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts, had met Marinot, Decorchemont and all the other French creators of Art Deco glass. Thomas Buechner, President of the (p, 296) Corning Museum of Glass, wrote of him: ‘An academician by training, he produced in all the late Victorian styles, including Chinese; contributed to the ever more precious oeuvre of the Art Nouveau and to the rhythmic revival of Neoclassicism. The frivolous Venetian style was as at home on his drafting table as Bauhaus Functionalism. No man could better personify the kaleidoscope of glassmaking during the past hundred years.'”