Featured Reverse painted painting?

I tried to take pictures of this very old piece of art. It is a scenic painting, that has a layer of painted glass over the over part of the painting to give it depth and beauty, I would suppose. Just curious as to what the process is called and if it was common at any particular time? Sorry for the crappy pictures, it was very hard to photograph the layered glass...and I could not remove it from the frame!

 

Flipper
Have you tried taking your pictures slightly from the side? I photograph a lot of orchids and sometimes they are in a glass case. I learned from a professional photographer that if you take a picture of something under glass from an angle, it works better. I haven't photographed reverse paintings before and perhaps there is a different technique for this. Just a thought.
Kiko

 

Thank you for the suggestion. I could not find an angle that was not effected by the light or reflection. The one above was the only one that seemed okay. The other thing is that it looks like oil? smooshed in between the panes in some spots, which obscured the painting even more. This was at someone else's home, as well.

 

flipper, am I right in thinking it has several layers of glass, which are all painted on the reverse? A bit like theatre sets, one level of the scene after another?

The castle in the foreground looks Central European. 'Hinterglasmalerei', literally painting behind glass, used to be very popular in Germany, Austria, and South Tyrole. It is still being done in some regions.

 

Thank you, AJ! What a nice short word to remember! So, I looked through a bunch of examples and could not really find a similar scene or frame...can we guesstimate the age? She said it was her grandfather's.

 

That's German for you. Mind you, Dutch can be just as bad.

My guesstimate, second half of the 19th century. Maybe 1870-90, but let's wait for the others.

 

Not much help here, but what I can tell of the technique reminds me a bit of a picture that my grandparents had hanging in their home for many years. Theirs was a different scene -- a large ship in the water, and I believe it was docked. These grandparents were both born in Germany, although they met in the U.S. as young adults. My grandfather worked on ships for most of his adult life, and I suppose the picture belonged to him. It did appear to be reverse painted, although the image could possibly have been printed on the back of glass.