Wine glass 18th-19th century

This wine glass of unknown date was made by an anonymous artist, and is now held in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The existence of such a commonplace object in a museum collection is a reminder that the history of art is also the history of social life. Even a simple object like this encodes cultural information about class, social ritual, and the economics of production. To understand this glass fully, we might ask questions about the glass-making industry in its place and time. Was it handmade, or mass produced? Who would have used it, and on what occasions? Objects like this can tell us a lot about the social structures of their time, but only if we treat them as historical documents. The work of the art historian is to reconstruct these lost contexts. By using resources like trade records, probate inventories, and etiquette manuals, we can begin to recover the complex social world that this simple glass once occupied.