Lidded Jar

Marinot began his career as a Fauvist painter, becoming fascinated with glassmaking after visiting the Viard glass factory in 1911. At first he experimented by enameling clear blanks supplied by the factory; in 1912 he apprenticed himself to the factory’s gaffers and soon was blowing his own forms and engraving or acid-etching geometric and abstract patterns onto their surfaces. A master of integral decoration, he introduced gold flecks, used different colors of opaque glass in tandem, and exploited the random, trapped air bubbles considered undesirable by other glassworkers; equating glasswork with the art of painting, he signed each of his bottles, flasks, and stopped jars. Marinot’s glass won universal acclaim at the 1925 Paris exposition.