Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (40.1999)

It is commonly accepted that Anna Radziwiłł established her first carpet
manufactures in Biała, Korelicze and Nieśwież when her husband Karol
Stanisław was still alive but references scattered in letters written by an
administrator of the Nieśwież estate during the Great Northern War suggest
that there was but one manufacture which was moved and adjusted according
to the owner s needs.

The turning point in the Princess’ life was the year 1719. Widowed at the
age of forty-four, she was granted a right to supervise the Radziwiłłs’ estate,
running a debt of almost two million zlotys. Thanks to diplomatic and political
activities undertaken by Anna Radziwiłł in the twenties and thirties on behalf
of her sons, the family regained the so called Neuburg estate. At the same
time she supervised her own estates, changed administration, employed
competent and diligent stewards, leaseholders, commissioners and governors.
She patronised all kinds of economic initiatives in her lands which, in short
time, caused the estates, neglected and destroyed during the Great Northern
War, to come to life again. She built dikes, roads, mills, inns, estates, granges
and barns for the imported Dutch cattle. It was during that period that two
independent industrial centres, in Naliboki and Biała, were founded.

The first European-style manufacture founded by Anna Radziwiłł in 1727
was the crystalline glassworks in Naliboki.8 It seems obvious that the
Princess was inspired by the king August II or by the Grand Hetman of the
Crown Army Sieniawski, advocates of the development of high technology
glassworks. Both founded glassworks - the king in 1710-1713 in Bielany near
Warsaw, Sieniawski in 1717/1718 in Lubaczów9 - not limited to production
of the common, most popular glass as they aimed at producing luxurious,
crystalline glass, previously unknown in Poland. In 1724 the king’s technologist
and glassmaker Franciszek Fremel10 was invited to the reorganised royal
manufacture, who helped to establish by the foundry a cutter’s and an
engraver’s shop on Western European level. Already in the seventeen twenties
cutters, engravers and metallurgists brought by Fremel from the Brandenburg
glassworks in Potsdam and the Saxon glassworks in Dresden11 created
a characteristic, early type of Radziwiłł glass, with an original style of polished

Among others Birże and Słuck, the estate belonging to Birze lineage of the Radziwiłł family,
which, by way of marriage of Ludwika Karolina Radziwiłł, the last of the lineage, became
a property of Józef Karol the Rhenish Palatine from Sulzbach lineage.

s H. Chojnacka, “Początki szkła kryształowego w Polsce w XVIII w.”, Szkło i Ceramika, XX,
1969, 10, pp. 263-268; H. Chojnacka, P. Chrzanowska, “Nalibockie szkło wypukło szlifowane”,
in O rzemiośle artystycznym w Polsce. Materiały z Sesji Naukowej Oddziału Poznańskiego
Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki, Warszawa 1976, pp. 185-208; A.J. Kasprzak, Szkła z hut
radziwiłłowskich, exh. cat., National Museum in Warsaw, May-July 1998, vol. 1, 2.

K. Buczkowski, Dawne szkła artystyczne w Polsce, Kraków 1958; Chojnacka, op. cit., pp. 4-5;
Polskie szkło do połowy XZX wieku, Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków-Gdańsk 1987, ed. II, pp. 88-90.
1(1 Chojnacka, op. cit., pp. 4-5; as early as in the sixteen nineties Fremel, on the king’s order,
founded several glassworks in Saxony, and then in Bielany, Lubaczów and near Otwock.

11 A.J. Kasprzak, “Hutnicy i ‘rysownicy’ z rodziny Heinzów w hucie nalibockiej w 1. połowie
XVIII”, in Sztuka Zdobnicza. Materiały Sesji Oddziału Warszawskiego Stowarzyszenia Historyków
Sztuki, vol. 2, in press.

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