Louis Comfort Tiffany

The chief innovation of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), American painter and designer, was his glass technology. He was also a pioneer of the Art Nouveau style.

Louis C. Tiffany was born in New York City on Feb. 18, 1848, the son of the founder and director of the jewelry retailers Tiffany and Company. Louis was interested in painting as a young man; he studied with George Inness and traveled in Europe and Africa, recording his impressions. Because of his pictures' decorative qualities, they were successful in New York.

By the 1870s Tiffany was becoming interested in the decorative arts. He and the painter John La Farge studied glassmaking at the Heidt glassworks in Brooklyn. Their original individual experiments probably concerned stained glass. However, the process whereby an iridescent finish could be produced on glass fascinated Tiffany; he was trying to duplicate the finish seen on ancient Greek, Roman, and other glass which had been buried for many hundreds of years. By 1880 he had applied for patents on this type of finish.

In 1879 he founded the Louis C. Tiffany Company, "Associated Artists." The firm decorated private and public buildings. Two of the best examples of this work in New York City were the 7th Regiment Armory (1880) and the H.O. Havemeyer house (1890; destroyed). In 1892 he founded the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, which specialized in producing stained-glass windows and glass mosaics. By this time he was also producing blown glass for both decorative and table-service use, and in 1893 he established his own furnaces for this purpose. The company was reorganized into Tiffany Studios in 1900.

In the following years, Tiffany produced jewelry, enamels, pottery, lamps, glass, mosaics, and monumental stained-glass windows. He built a palatial home, Laurelton Hall, at Oyster Bay, Long Island, which overshadowed in luxury and visual impact his several residences in New York City. In 1918 Tiffany gave Laurelton Hall (destroyed) to the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, which administered a fellowship program for young artists. The Tiffany firm was not disbanded until 3 years after its founder's death on Jan. 17, 1933.

Tiffany Glass

Tiffany's genius is seen in his decorative productions in glass and metal. For the glass he originated the trademark Favrile, and the name became synonymous with these handmade products of high quality. It is doubtful that Tiffany did much of the glassblowing himself, but he personally supervised the craftsmen and encouraged them to be as inventive as possible. As a result, there are highly individual vases, bottles, and dishes in a multitude of colors and techniques. Some of the pieces were utilitarian, but others were executed often as a pure tour de force. Some were treated with acids which gave the iridescent effect of ancient excavated glass. Another type, called lava glass, resembled volcanic lava. One of the most complicated types was cameo-style glass. After 1900 more or less standardized sets of tableware began to be produced; they do not have the individuality and attention to detail of the purely decorative pieces.

Tiffany glass is marked in a number of ways. Often it is found with scratched marks—the initials L.C.T. or the name spelled out; but the word FAVRILE and various numbers are the marks most often encountered. Sometimes small paper labels, often marked T. G. & D. Co., are pasted to pieces. Not all pieces have a distinguishing mark, however.

Tiffany Metalwork

Metal alloys were used to fashion bowls, boxes, vases, candlesticks, desk sets, and lamps. A number of finishes could be applied to these pieces, so that they varied from a shiny gold to a dark-green bronze patination, which in some instances became almost black. Brightly colored enamels were used on some pieces. The lamps had shades of stained glass which was leaded in flower forms, geometric shapes, or tiles. These pieces are often stamped TIFFANY STUDIOS. In style, they sometimes show the influence of 19th-century historical revivalism. Some of the shapes are derived from classical art, and others are inspired by Egyptian, Byzantine, Romanesque, and even Japanese forms.

However, Tiffany exhibited his most progressive tendencies in pieces in the Art Nouveau style. Indeed, he was one of the few Americans involved in this predominantly European movement, and his works survive as one of its most elegant statements. These pieces are often inspired by nature and conceived as a single unit free from the fussiness of revivalism.

Further Reading

Robert Koch, Louis C. Tiffany: Rebel in Glass (1964), is the only biography. A wide selection of his work is provided in Museum of Contemporary Crafts, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Exhibition (1958).

Additional Sources

Duncan, Alastair, Louis Comfort Tiffany, New York: H.N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1992.

Koch, Robert, Louis C. Tiffany, rebel in glass, New York: Crown, 1982. □

TIFFANY, LOUIS COMFORT 1848-1933

Designer

Decorator to the Wealthy

Louis Comfort Tiffany began his career in the late nineteenth century as what today would be called an interior decorator. While helping wealthy clients coordinate the furniture, wallpaper, tapestries, carpets, and light fixtures in their new homes, Tiffany became interested in the decorative possibilities of leaded-glass windows. Rejecting etched and painted glass, he experimented with colored glass. He found most colored glass too dull for his tastes, so he hired chemists to develop richer and more vibrant colors. He also experimented with different types of glass and with double panes. Tiffany's daring techniques resulted in masterful designs that used light as an active element in a way that was previously unimaginable. Tiffany also experimented with multicolored glass in mosaics, designing large, inlaid murals for the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia and for the National Theater in Mexico City; on the latter project twenty men worked for more than fifteen months to produce two hundred of the three-foot-square panels required for construction.

Early Life and Training

Louis Comfort Tiffany was born in 1848 into a wealthy family. His father, Charles Tiffany, a dealer in fine silver and jewelry, founded Tiffany and Company a year before Louis Tiffany's birth. Tiffany graduated from the Flushing Academy on Long Island at eighteen, then studied with the painters George Innes and Samuel Colman before going to Paris to study under Leon Bailly. After traveling in Europe and Africa, he returned to New York in 1870. The following year he was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design.

Designer and Collector

Tiffany continued as a painter, but his familiarity with America's upper class soon led him into designing their homes. He gathered an army of craftsmen and craftswomen and managed every detail, coordinating furniture, wallpaper, tapes-tries, carpets, and light fixtures into coherent decorative styles. In the 1880s Tiffany worked for Cornelius Vanderbilt in New York, Potter Palmer in Chicago, and Lily Langtry in London. He decorated several rooms in the White House in 1883. He supplied his clients with the rarest objets d'art money could buy and in the process became a great collector himself.

Glass and Light

Tiffany became interested in the decorative potential of glass in windows, drinking glasses, vases, and lamps. Soon he was designing ornate windows of richly colored glass pieced together with lead. His scenes, illuminated from behind by sun-light or gaslight, shimmered with color. He experimented, together with a chemist, with methods for enhancing the iridescence and colors of glass, creating what became known as Favrile Glass, in which the pigment was injected directly into the molten glass. He formed the Tiffany Glass Company in 1878, which became the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in 1892. In the 1900s he began producing bronze-based lamps that supported colorful leaded glass shades. In London he showed a dragonfly-shade lamp of leaded glass and the Nautilus Lamp, consisting of a bronze mermaid base holding up a shade made from a nautilus shell. The Pond Lily Lamp, exhibited in 1902, comprised a cluster of eighteen bronze stems curving up-ward to form a lily-pad base and terminating in slender decorated shades. Other leaded-glass shades were designed to be suspended from the ceiling. Besides lamps, Tiffany designed domestic tableware in gold or deep blue iridescent glass: liqueur, claret, sherry, champagne, and water glasses; decanters; finger bowls; ice cream plates; pin trays; and salt cellars. His decorative patterns included the Flemish, slightly waisted with an applied band of horizontal parallel glass threads; the Royal, an elegant double-twist stem; the Earl, glass stretched into frills; and the Prime and the Queen, fairly plain patterns with straight stems that were produced in the greatest quantity. Tiffany's Art Nouveau style won him many customers, as well as fifty-four design awards: the latter included the Grand Prix and a Special Diploma at the 1902 First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts in Turin, a Gold Medal at the 1904 World's Fair in Saint Louis, a Medal of Honour at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, a Grand Prix at the 1909 Seattle Exposition, a Gold Medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, and a Gold Medal at the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition.

Later Life

Tiffany's career declined during the 1920s, and by the 1930s he had little left but a ware-house full of unwanted glass. Tiffany died in 1933, a month before his eighty-fifth birthday. While he never again saw his work appreciated as it had been in the first decades of the century, Tiffany's achievements have been reappraised and now are regarded as some of America's foremost design treasures.

Source:

Victor Arwas, Glass: Art Nouveau to Art Deco (New York: Abrams, 1987).

Louis Comfort Tiffany 1848-1933, American artist, decorative designer, and art patron, b. New York City; son of Charles Lewis Tiffany. He studied painting with Inness and in Paris and painted oils and watercolors in Europe and Morocco. Later he established the interior-decorating firm in New York City which came to be known as Tiffany Studios. The firm specialized in favrile glass work, characterized by iridescent colors and natural forms in the art nouveau style. This work ranged from lamps and vases to stained-glass windows and a huge glass curtain for the national theater in Mexico City. His lamps became enormously popular in the 1960s and were widely imitated. In 1919, Tiffany established the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, which presently provides study and travel grants for art students. Tiffany is represented in the Metropolitan Museum by a painting, Snake Charmer at Tangiers, in the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) by several glass pieces, and most completely in the Neustadt Museum of Tiffany Art (New York City).

Bibliography: See E. Neustadt's The Lamps of Tiffany (1971).

Tiffany, Louis Comfort (1848–1933). American designer, interior decorator, and architect, his country's most famous exponent of the Art Nouveau style. He was born in New York, the son of a prosperous jeweller, and spent virtually all his career there. His initial training was as a painter, but in the 1870s he turned more to the decorative arts and founded an interior decorating business in 1879. Tiffany became famous above all for his highly distinctive glass vases and lamps, but until about 1900 his firm was better known for stained glass and mosaic work (it did interiors for many socially prominent New Yorkers as well as for clubs). Most of his architectural work has perished, including his own mansion on Long Island, Laurelton Hall (1903–5), which was regarded as his masterpiece; however, the main entrance of this building survived the fire that destroyed the building in 1957 and is now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Tiffany was also an art patron and established a foundation that provided study and travel grants for students.

Tiffany, Louis Comfort (b New York, 18 Feb. 1848; d New York, 17 Jan. 1933). American designer, interior decorator, and architect, his country's most famous exponent of the Art Nouveau style. The son of a prosperous jeweller, he initially trained as a painter, but in the 1870s he turned more to the decorative arts and founded an interior decorating business in 1879. Tiffany became famous above all for his highly distinctive glass vases and lamps, but until about 1900 his firm was better known for stained glass and mosaic work (it did interiors for many socially prominent New Yorkers as well as for clubs). Most of his architectural work has perished, including his own mansion on Long Island, Laurelton Hall (1903–5), which was regarded as his masterpiece; however, its main entrance survived the fire that destroyed the building in 1957 and is now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Tiffany was also an art patron and established a foundation that provided study and travel grants for students.

Tiffany, Louis Comfort (1848–1933). American designer, interior decorator, and architect, his country's most famous exponent of the Art Nouveau style. He was born in New York, the son of a prosperous jeweller, and spent virtually all his career there. His initial training was as a painter, but in the 1870s he turned more to the decorative arts and founded an interior decorating business in 1879. Tiffany became famous above all for his highly distinctive glass vases and lamps, but until about 1900 his firm was better known for stained glass and mosaic work (it did interiors for many socially prominent New Yorkers as well as for clubs). Most of his architectural work, including his own mansion on Long Island, has been destroyed, but the loggia of the main entrance of his masterpiece, Laurelton Hall (1903–5), has been installed in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Tiffany was also an art patron and established a foundation that provided grants for students.

Tiffany, Louis Comfort (1848–1933). American designer, best known for his work in the Art Nouveau style. He evolved interiors for McKim, Mead, & White and Carrère & Hastings, among others. His works include the Chapel for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, IL (1893), parts of which survive, the loggia of Laurelton Hall, NYC (1903–5—re-erected in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and the Hanley House, Oyster Bay, NY (1921). He designed many fine artefacts in glass, and his work has been favourably compared with the best French Art Nouveau works of the period.

Bibliography

Greenhalgh (ed.) (2000);
D. C. Johnson (1979);
R. Koch (1966);
H. McKean (1980);
Placzek (ed.) (1982);
Jane Turner (1996);
Tschudi-Madsen (1967)

Tiffany, Louis Comfort (1848–1933) US painter and designer, leader of the art nouveau style in the USA. In 1878, he formed an interior decorating firm, which by 1900 was known as Tiffany Studios. It specialized in what he termed ‘favrile’ glass – freely shaped iridescent glasswork, sometimes combined with various metals.