Terebella Emmalina (marine worm). © National Museum & Gallery, Cardiff.

Jade Wright went to Bolton Museum and saw the secrets of sea without getting wet.

During the late 19th century, the Dresden studio of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka produced exquisitely detailed glass models of exotic plants and sea creatures for natural history museums and aquaria all over the world.

The Glass Aquarium exhibition, at Bolton Museum until May 7 2005, displays a selection of these models of marine life, including squids, sea slugs, cuttlefish, sea squirts, jellyfish and dead men’s fingers.

All are astonishingly lifelike, even in comparison with the museum’s aquarium of real animals, demonstrating the Blaschkas’ painstaking attention to detail.

Following the invention of the submarine and deep sea diving kit in the mid-1800s the public had become fascinated by the bizarre plants and extraordinary creatures discovered beneath the sea.

The Blaschkas offered a glimpse into those exotic worlds at a time when techniques for preserving plants or creatures would not permit ordinary people to see the real thing. These lifelike replicas were ideal, and museums and educational establishments everywhere were desperate to offer a glimpse of a secret world.

Physalia arethusa (Portuguese man of war, colonial hydrozoan jellyfish). © National Maritime Museum, Cardiff.

During the 1860s, they supplied glass sea anemones, snails and jellyfish to museums, aquaria and private collectors all over Europe. In 1876 they received a large order from London’s South Kensington Museum, now the Natural History Museum.

Harvard University, impressed by the exhibits in Europe, placed an order for 4,400 replica flowers for their botanical collection – the rest of the Ivy League quickly followed suit. Many of the Blaschkas’ replicas are still on general display, at Harvard and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Others have spent years in storage, like those at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

The work is an outstanding example of the fusion of design, craftsmanship and industrial manufacturing. Both Leopold, and his son Rudolf, came from a long line of skilled glassmakers.

Leopold was unusually artistic as a child, and was apprenticed as a goldsmith and gemcutter after school before joining the family business to make ornaments and glass eyes for taxidermists.

His hobby was the newly fashionable sphere of natural history. In the late 1850s, Leopold began making glass models of the tropical flowers he found in natural history books. A local aristocrat, Prince Camille de Rohan, learnt of his work and commissioned 100 glass models of his orchid collection.

Rhizostoma pulmo (scyphozoan jellyfish) model, Photo by Michael P. Cooper, courtesy of Nottingham City Museums and Galleries.

Leopold excelled at these reproductions, and a curator at the nearby Dresden Natural History Museum decided that rather than exhibiting preserved creatures in glass jars for a display of marine invertebrates he would require a dozen glass replica sea anemones.

Displayed at aquaria as well as the Dresden museum, the sea anemones were so accurate in scale, colour and form that news of Leopold’s prowess spread swiftly.

Today, the Blaschkas seem refreshingly contemporary, working as they did on the border between design, craft, art and industry. In 2001, one of their 1,890 glass polychate worms from Cardiff appeared on the cover of Frieze, the British art magazine.

Even in their own era, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka resisted conventional definitions and described themselves as “natural history artisans”. As for their work, it was hailed at the time as “an artistic marvel in the field of science and a scientific marvel in the field of art.”

The Glass Aquarium is a touring exhibition organised by the Design Museum in collaboration with the National Glass Centre, Sunderland. A book, funded by the Wellcome Trust, accompanies the exhibition.

Jade Wright is the 24 Hour Museum Renaissance Student Writer in the North West region. Renaissance is the groundbreaking initiative to transform England's regional museums, led by MLA, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.