One of the earliest masters, if not the inventor of this method, was Frans Greenwood, who appears indeed to have worked with the wheel also. Greenwood—his name would point to an English extraction—was born at Rotterdam in 1680, and the latest date found on his engraved work is 1743. There is in the British Museum a wine-glass with a Bacchic subject, a highly finished example of this _pointillé_ process, signed ‘F. Greenwood f^t.’ In the eighteenth century this stippling on glass was practised by painters of some note. Thus there are two glasses in the Rijks Museum (dated 1750 and 1751) both stippled with portrait heads, which bear the signature of Aart Schouman, a portrait-painter of repute at the time. But the greatest master of the art was Wolf, an eccentric genius who lived at the Hague. We know little of him except that he married in 1787, and died young in 1808. Glasses stippled with graceful designs by this master, somewhat in the manner of Bartolozzi, are perhaps less rare than those of Greenwood or Schouman. Some of his engravings are found upon goblets of flint glass with facetted stems, of English make, probably. On an example of his work in the British Museum a graceful female figure bears a scroll with the words, ‘_Werken van het genootschap. K.W.D.A.V._’ The tradition of Wolf was carried on by Daniel Henriques de Castro, who died as late as 1862. The son of the latter artist, in an article on the subject in the first volume of _Oud Holland_, has collected some traditions bearing on the methods of execution of this now lost process. The author relates how he had come across an old man who had watched Wolf while at work on one of his glasses; according to his report, his only tools were an etching-needle and a small hammer. This is a matter of some importance, as both the late Mr. Nesbitt and Mr. Hartshorne appear to have taken it for granted that this delicate film-like engraving was produced, in part at least, by means of acid. But the two processes can hardly have been combined, and the effect is quite unlike that produced when the surface of glass is eaten away by hydrofluoric acid. It would, indeed, be quite impossible to produce such delicate work by any etching process of this latter kind.[227] I shall have something to say of the Dutch wine-glasses of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when I come to speak of the English glasses that were in a measure founded on them. Suffice to mention that already, before the end of the seventeenth century, we find on these glasses the welted foot and the baluster stem moulded and uncut, enclosing one or more ‘tears’—forms that somewhat later passed over to England. CHAPTER XIX ENGLISH GLASS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES