Preparatory Drawing for Octopus Model (facsimile courtesy of the Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass)

In 1863, Leopold Blaschka moved from Czechoslovakia to Dresden, Germany where his earliest exhibit, 100 or so glass orchids, had inspired the director of Dresden's natural history museum to commission a group of glass sea anemones for an artificial aquarium

The first step in creating a glass model was to make a detailed drawing from which to work. In their later work the Blaschkas used actual preserved or live specimens as models, but until that time they relied on book illustrations for models.

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