Lobmeyr Drinking Set No. 4 Water Tumbler

The water tumbler of Lobmeyr's Drinking Set No. 4 is a small, plain beaker of colourless crystal, 9.5 centimetres high, its sides rising almost straight from a gently rounded base to an open rim. It carries no cut, no engraving and no decoration of any kind. What distinguishes it is its thinness: it is blown in muslin glass, so fine that the rim is less than a millimetre thick, and so light that it seems to weigh almost nothing in the hand.

The set was the work of Ludwig Lobmeyr, who with his brother Josef took over their father's Viennese glassware business in 1855. Heavily cut crystal was then the height of fashion. Against it Ludwig set a service of plain, thin glasses, which the firm still describes as so new in its day that it might be called an invention. It was Lobmeyr's first muslin glass service, and it took the number 4 in the firm's catalogue, a number it still carries.

Muslin glass is named after the fine woven cotton, and it demands great skill. The glass is blown into wet beechwood moulds, where the steam forms a cushion that gives the surface its sheen, and is then annealed, cut at the rim and fire-polished. Like all Lobmeyr glass it is made from lead-free crystal, the firm holding that lead crystal is too brittle to be blown so fine.

The set outlived the empire whose court it supplied. An early price list from the shop on Kärntnerstrasse offers dozens of pieces, from water bottles to finger bowls, and Josef Hoffmann's Patrician set of 1917 was modelled on it. Lobmeyr, still a family firm, lists 17 shapes of No. 4 today, and the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, which Ludwig Lobmeyr helped to found, holds a glass from the set made in 2008.