Franz Tieze

Who was Franz Tieze?

Franz Tieze was a late 19th-century Dublin-based forger. An exiled Bohemian glass engraver, he worked in Dublin in the studios of the Pugh Brothers at The Potters Alley Glass Works, the only manufacturers of flint-glass in Ireland. Tieze had been recruited, with other Bohemian glass engravers, by the Pugh Brothers and he arrived in Dublin in 1865 to engrave glass in the 'antique style'.

Cork historian Robert Day and Franz Tieze collaborated in supplying goblets to a ready market of glass collectors. Day researched Irish Volunteer glass designs and Jacobite toasting glasses. Tieze's engraving skills allowed the work to be categorised as "historicist". Thomas Rohan, in his Confessions of a Dealer, noted the flood of Volunteer and Williamite glasses in Dublin. An example of Tieze's work is the Charlemont Jug, regarded as genuine until scrutinised firstly by Mary Boydell and then by Peter Francis, a modern Irish researcher who found compelling evidence in Tieze's own notebooks, showing that the age and style of the engraving had been faked, circa 1900. It was subsequently acquired by the National Museum of Ireland.

Francis' revelations appeared in the Burlington Magazine in 1994.