Within the storied pile of Audley House – between a rack of tweed breeks and a silver egg service, crested by a flying mallard – sits a backlit collection of the kind of gleaming glassware you’d expect to find in a well-curated drinks cabinet. The crystal has heft, but each tumbler or decanter is engraved with a meticulous, gossamer image of British wildlife, rendered in kinetic detail.
Each of these arcadian little portraits is the work of Carl Palmer. Now in his sixties, Palmer is a master of the anachronistic and highly skilled art of copper wheel engraving – transposing fine images onto crystal glass via tiny copper wheels, placed on the end of metal spindles and spun with a lathe.
The style originated in the Roman era’s lapidary and glassblowing booms. It quietly stagnated for centuries, but was revived properly in 17th-century Bohemia and Saxony, and subsequently embraced across the continent and in England (the form’s golden age in this country truly kickstarted with the introduction of less brittle and more malleable ‘lead crystal’ in the 18th and early 19th centuries).
Its popularity declined after WWI – a result of modernising tastes – reaching a nadir with the advent of the artsy, ‘studio glass’ movement of the 1970s. Now, it’s a truly specialist undertaking; ‘highly endangered’ according to the charity Heritage Crafts and practiced by only a handful of artisans in the UK.
Palmer’s journey into the recesses of fine glass began at Dudley College Art School, a renowned institution within the fine glass industry. His formal apprenticeship in copper wheel engraving, though, commenced at Royal Brierley – a crystal glass company founded in 1776 near Stourbridge in the West Midlands – under the esteemed engraver Michael Fairbairn.
Palmer remained at Royal Brierley for 15 years, eventually becoming its head engraver, supplying crystal to Cartier, Harrods, Asprey and the Royal Palaces (among others). His relationship with Purdey commenced around 2010, after undertaking some engraving work for an employee of the gunmaker, whose colleagues were piqued by the deft handiwork. He’s been commissioned to create winsome pastoral scenes on glass tumblers, decanters and goblets for Purdey ever since.
The process of copper wheel engraving is both mechanistically simple and wildly intricate. “Wheel engraving is all about detail,” Palmer explains. Take a stag, immortalised on a tumbler. Working from a scrapbooked photograph or drawing of the animal, Palmer first sketches out the beast – “the muscle tone, the antlers and the way that the eyes are shaped… to make it as realistic as possible” – before drawing it on to the glass with a pen.
Enter the wheels themselves. Palmer has around 70 handmade copper discs (ranging from four inches in diameter to the size of a pin-head), but he’ll normally start, he explains, with a miniscule one that just fits the top of a spindle, turned with one of his two old German lathes.
He makes an abrasive slurry of emery or silicon carbide powder, olive oil and paraffin, which he consistently feeds onto the wheel with his finger as it turns. The rougher the paste, he says, the greater the depth and texture of the engraving: starting with the animal’s muscles and erring smoother, to create the face and develop the fur in assiduous detail.
The clarity of the glass and the complexity of the design, Palmer explains, means that the recessed forms actually appear in a kind of illusory relief. “The way the light bounces around the glass, its various different depths… you can't do that with any other type of engraving,” he says, effusively. “Anything that protrudes or stands out: that's the deepest part. When the light gets behind it, it gives a three-dimensional effect, as if it jumps out the glass.”
This sense of tactile wonderment doesn’t come quickly. A single tumbler takes around 12 hours to engrave, and the rarefied status of this historic craft – sequestered within the realm of Fine Arts and, motorisation aside, unchanged from its earliest forms – is only emphasised by its scarcity. What advice would he give a young, would-be engraver? “Well there isn’t any,” he laughs. “It’s so time consuming, which is probably why it’s dying out. It’s the most difficult form of engraving. It’s years and years of practice – and it’s a natural ability.”
Despite his lofty position within this fading creative milieu, Palmer remains modest ‘til the end. “It sounds a cliché, but they truly are the antiques of the future,” he says, with another resigned chuckle. “A man with a rotating copper wheel… it’s archaic really.”