The glass collection of the Basel Historical Museum comprises about 1100 items. The collection has not been built up typologically but has been accumulated as a result of gifts and bequests from private Basel collectors. However, it has a good range and offers the connoisseur some interesting examples of international manufacture – for instance, a very early example of cut glass from Nuremberg or three diamondcut glasses of historical importance, or the bottle once owned by the mayor of Basel Johann Rudolf Wettstein.
The earliest glass, from the 13th or 14th century, has come from excavations in Basel. The range extends forward to large crystalglass services from the first half of the 20th century. Quantitatively German and Bohemian cut glass of the 18th and 19th, of varying quality, predominates. The collection includes simple beakers and goblets incised with the coats of arms of old Basel families or of the guilds – these coats of arms were probably added by itinerant glasscutters. Swiss glass manufactories of the 18th and 19th century, for example the Entlebucher factory, producing enamelled, coloured and cut glass with folkloristic motifs, are also represented.
In 1993 more than 500 glasses passed to the Basel Historical Museum from the very varied collection of the former Museum of Applied Arts. As a result the collection extends to industrial design and to historicising glasses, such as a group of glasses from the Rheinische Glasshütten AG of Ehrenfeld near Cologne, which in the 19th century specialised in copies of antique and historic glass.
