Reifschlager Gallery At The Rockwell Museum–pre 2000

Webster’s definition: Designating, or pertaining to, a process for casting bronze statutes, etc., which consists in constructing a model with a wax surface of suitable thickness, forming the outside mold about this, heating so that the wax melts and runs out, and filling the vacant space with metal.

The very wording of this definition which as published about the time Carder started his cire perdue experiments, implies that the use of this process for casting glass had not yet become well enough known to be included, though glass is referred to in the trade as “metal.” Although he had seen the lost was glass pieces that Decorchemont, Rousseau, and other French glassmakers had produced many years earlier, this knowledge and some practical experience with lost wax bronze castings were about all the tangibles Carder had when he started his experimentation on casting glass by the cire perdue process i the early 1930s. But he had one other essential ingredient–dogged perseverance–which carried hi through to success.

His basic idea of the process was a relatively simple concept. If bronze and other metals could be cast by this process, why not glass?

ÿabstracted from The Glass of Frederick Carder by Paul V. Gardner p.125