During late 19th-century Europe, there was a great wave of interest in Islamic or Moorish art, which influenced many aspects of the applied arts and interior decoration. Collecting, studying, and copying Islamic art from earlier centuries became also became quite popular.
The continuous great demand for glass artefacts was supplied by the Liege-born Philippe-Joseph Brocard (1831–1896).
This Belgian independent glassmaker, inspired by enameled glass items from the Mamluk period, began to collect them and then to copy them and was especially gifted at creating successful facsimiles of Islamic enameled glass. Although a craftsman who began his career as a restorer of antiques, around the 1850s Brocard began to study the Islamic tradition of glass-making and to experiment with Islamic decorative techniques, such as staining and enameling. It was while studying the enamelling of glass that all his efforts focused on the ambition to reproduce medieval Syrian glass. He finally managed to craft a 14th- and 15th-century Syrian glass reproduction which he first exhibited at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris.
Brocard's glass production is purely decorative and mostly notable for its lyrical but precise polychrome enamel decoration, been nowadays displayed as a major example of 19th century historicism.