Peter Dreiser MBE, 69, Britain’s greatest 20th-century wheel-engraver on glass
Hoodoo
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2171106.html
Peter Dreiser
June 11, 1936 - April 4, 2006
Virtuoso glass engraver who mixed lyrical reflections on nature with
forbidding images of ecodoom
GASPING for air, the teeming fish are trapped, doomed, beneath a
broiling oil spill. The vase is made from glass, but where the sky
should be clear, above the rim of the sea, all is ominously dark and
birds too are dying. Although a thing of beauty, it is a witness to
the environmental tragedy that will loom so large in our legacy.
It is the work of Peter Dreiser, Britain’s greatest 20th-century
wheel-engraver on glass. Entitled The Price of Oil, it is a fine
example of both his art and his passionate concern about the
industrial rape of the world. Thanks to an anonymous benefactor, it is
now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Another of Dreiser’s pieces, Voracity, tells the story another way.
Engraved on a glass disc 13½in (34cm) in diameter is a projection of
the globe in lush green but with Europe, at its centre, obliterated by
heads munching their way outwards.
“As the natural resources of the Western world are rapidly devoured,”
wrote Dreiser, “the insatiable appetite of the industrial monster,
like a cancer, can only be satisfied by seeking out new territory.”
Nature and destruction are present simultaneously. The heads in a
circle form a kind of flower, while the dark stain at the centre might
be a tree, though it also has the terrible beauty of a mushroom cloud.
Dreiser’s imagery was not always so foreboding — one engraving was
inspired by the simple beauty of raindrops on a washing line — but it
was usually suggestive and potent. A beautiful, rather feathery disc
shows over and over again the unmistakable eyes from the 1623
engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout, emphasising that for the
tragical, historical or comical, this was the observer of all the
observed. Only when you stand back do you see that the foot-wide disc
itself is an unblinking iris.
Peter Dreiser was born in Cologne in 1936, the son of a railway
engineer. The family home was bombed in 1943 and they were evacuated
to Bavaria, where they lived in a single room and were often short of
food. Dreiser, however, thought the countryside was “paradise” after
the city.
After the war the family was resettled in Brühl, North
Rhine-Westphalia, where Dreiser would pick over the coalmine slag
heaps for interesting minerals. He left school at 14, without academic
distinction but able to draw, so it was suggested that he visit the
State School for Art Glass in Rheinbach. There he saw stained glass
being made, enamelling, and glass cutting on huge stone wheels. The
crucial moment of his life, however, came when he came upon the
engraver Otto Pietsch using a copper wheel to draw a fox on a brandy
glass. As Dreiser arrived in the studio, Pietsch was engraving the
texture of the animal’s cheeks with such delicacy that the boy was
captivated forever.
He spent three years at the school, learning first to engrave leaves
pressed between two sheets of glass in silhouette, and how to draw a
ping-pong ball or a white feather on a white background. The school
had been founded by the best Bohemian engravers, so Dreiser became a
link in a chain of craftsmen stretching to the 18th century.
His graduation piece, showing stags and hounds in a wild landscape,
was the result of 55 hours of engraving. Yet he found there was little
demand for his skills, and spent a while trying to make a living as a
painter before being taken on by an 80-year-old engraver in Cologne
who was too ill to work and paid him a pittance.
In 1955 he moved to London to establish an engraving workshop in a
glass factory in Edmonton owned by a Bohemian refugee. There he spent
three years producing dressing-table sets and the like for Woolworths,
before his Spanish wife-to-be Tina found him a better job with a firm
that used silkscreen techniques to enamel on glass.
In the late 1950s he built himself a lathe at home and began engraving
again, though at first no London shops would stock his work. Finally,
a shop in Piccadilly commissioned six pieces, and he came to the
attention of Thomas Goode, of Mayfair, who offered him a permanent
post as an engraver.
Meanwhile he had begun buying 19th-century English engraved glasses in
Portobello Road for a few shillings or pounds a time, amassing such a
collection that in due course the sale of half of it through Goode
enabled him to buy a house.
With such expertise he also graduated to be the main auction buyer for
Goode.
If the prices fetched by antique glass raised Dreiser’s sights, so did
the opportunity to see examples of the glassengravings of Laurence
Whistler at an exhibition in 1969 at Agnew’s. Although they were very
different from his own, being stippled on clear, rather than coloured
glass, they showed Dreiser that an engraving could be “more than just
a picture on glass — it could be poetry on glass.”
Soon afterwards he set up his own freelance workshop. Commissions came
from the Bank of England, the Church Commissioners, the Royal College
of Physicians and the Prince of Wales.
For 25 years Dreiser taught at Morley College, near Westminster
Bridge, and for a time he was a visiting tutor at West Dean College,
near Chichester. Although he specialised in intaglio and relief
engraving with a copper wheel, the width of his knowledge was evident
in the book he wrote with Jonathan Matcham, The Techniques of Glass
Engraving (Batsford, 1982), still the standard manual.
In 1975 one of Dreiser’s pupils, Elly Eliades, founded the Guild of
Glass Engravers, with Laurence Whistler as its president. The report
on its first conference records a discussion of how glass should be
packed for transport: “Peter Dreiser, keen on recycling, advised the
use of newspaper and not wood-wool.”
Bringing together previously isolated craftsmen, the guild flourished
and within ten years had 700 members, several local branches, and good
links with the glass industry and museums. Its regular exhibitions
gave Dreiser a wider audience, and in 1977 a bursary from the Crafts
Council enabled him to tour the glass centres of Europe.
He served terms as vice-president of the Guild of Glass Engravers and
of the Royal Society of Miniaturists and Gravers — being, as one
colleague said, a giant among miniaturists.
For several years he made pieces for presentation by the Queen to
visiting dignitaries, as well as working for the Queen herself. Other
pieces are in the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, the Victoria
and Albert Museum and Broadfield House Glass Museum in Stourbridge.
He was an honorary liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Glass
Sellers, and recorded an account of his career for the National Life
Story series of the British Library. A second, expanded edition of
Techniques of Glass Engraving, giving more prominence to Dreiser’s own
work, is to be published by A&C Black in the autumn.
Yet another group to which Dreiser belonged was the Society of
Botanical Artists, thanks to pieces such as Cotton Grass, which
required all the skills of the young student drawing feathers. Looking
at nature as a gardener and photographer, Dreiser observed the cycle
of life and the struggle of life, and meditated upon them in glass in
various ways. Ambitions, for instance, showed the competition for
survival beginning even as a single sperm enters the ovum. If he felt
pity and anger for a world in thrall to the selfish gene, it was
perhaps because this singularly kind man possessed no such thing.
He was appointed MBE last year. He married Tina, daughter of the
musicologist Eduardo Martínez Torner, in 1957. She survives him, along
with their son and two daughters.
Peter Dreiser, MBE, glass engraver, was born on June 11, 1936. He died
of cancer on April 4, 2006, aged 69.
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http://www.ingenious.org.uk/media/4.0_SAC/webimages/1022/1/10221247_3.jpg
Picture number:10221247
Credit:Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library
Caption:
Engraved dome in ruby cased glass entitled 'Glass Through the Ages',
by Peter Dreiser. This piece of ruby cased glass was commissioned from
the artist by the Glass Manufacturers Federation and went on display
in the Science Museum's newly refurbished Glass Gallery in 1988. It is
engraved with scenes showing glass-making through the ages.
Glass-makers are shown blowing glass and manipulating it into sheets,
while others scenes show glass-making apparatus and products,
surrounded by the flames of a glass furnace.
In Collection of: Science & Society Picture Library
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Subject(s) > Trade & Industry > Glass Technology & Ceramics
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