A Fragile Peace: The Magic of American Cameo Glass from The Touma Collection

The art of glassmaking traces its beginnings to ancient times in the early cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. As the centuries passed, glassmakers became very skilled in their mastery of this fiery material, and by the time of the Roman Empire, the ability to fuse together layers of colored glass to form the walls of a vessel offered the opportunity to carve sophisticated surface designs on these objects. This type of glass, known as cameo glass, was prized for its beauty and rarity, and is epitomized by the famous Portland Vase, a Roman example that is now in the British Museum. As the modern era approached, the incredible difficulty of making the multilayered glass blanks and the labor-intensive process required to carve and etch this fragile material discouraged most manufacturers from pursuing it, and although it was revived for a period in the 19th century, the technique lay dormant for most of the 20th century. In the early 1980s, Kelsey Murphy was working as a graphic designer a