Pieces are generally larger than drinking glasses, and decorative rather than practical, other than for use as vases and lighting fittings; there is little tableware.

Prominently makers, from the 1890s onwards, are in France René Lalique, Emile Gallé and the Daum brothers, the American Louis Comfort Tiffany, Christopher Dresser in Scotland and England, and Friedrich Zitzman, Karl Koepping and Max Ritter von Spaun in Germany.

He presented his Art Nouveau works with success at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, and was a founder of the Ecole de Nancy, bridging together architect, glass and furniture designers.

The Daum brothers expressed their goal at the end of the 1880s: "to apply in an industrial way the true principles of decorative art.

"[5] Their method was to produce objects in series, as well as one-of-a-kind items, and they adapted well to the new technology of electric light bulbs.

They opened up a collaboration with the Belgian glass factory of Val Saint Lambert, and developed with them a new technique of enamelling and engraving called fluogravure, simpler and with fewer risks of breaking than the method used by Gallé and the Daum brothers.

In the early 1890s, working with Arthur Nash, an English glassmaker from Stourbridge England, he invented a method for blending different colors of glass in a molten state in a furnace.

They also treated glass with various metallic oxides and exposed it to acid fumes to achieve more brilliant lustre and light effects.

The Belgian designer Gustave Serrurier-Bovy created vases and other works that were similar to the Secession style, made of metal and glass in geometric forms.

The Scottish artist Christopher Dresser, from Glasgow, was a leading figure in Art Nouveau glass in the United Kingdom.

Victor Horta, the Belgian architect who designed some of the earliest Art Nouveau houses, used stained glass windows, combined with ceramics, wood and iron decoration with similar motifs, to create a harmony between functional elements and decoration, making a unified work of art.

In France, Art Nouveau stained glass was used by Alphonse Mucha to decorate the interior of the jewelry shop of Georges Fouquet.

One of the largest and last examples of Art Nouveau decorative glass in Paris is the cupola of the Galeries Lafayette Department store (1912).

Early Art Nouveau stained glass generally used traditional techniques and subjects, but usually featured floral themes and women as the central figures.

Koloman Moser designed decorative angels for the windows of the Kirche am Steinhof, a church built by Otto Wagner (1905).