Jan Baránek

Jan Beránek was literally born for glassmaking. He said that as a boy (even before he was 13, when he officially joined the factory), he filled handcarts with peat from the fields around the factory to power the oldest furnace that his father built there in 1941. His first early designs from the early 1950s, created when he was only 18 years old, understandably follow his father's domestic style of the time. Although often well proportioned and focused on subtle colors and curved shapes, the surfaces are smooth and any optical effects of the modeled surfaces are minimal. His later, more mature designs