: Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) is a designer/manufacturer who
needs no introduction. His work is on permanent view in most
major museums and there have been many specialized exhibitions,
each focusing on one aspect of his vast production. It has been a
long time, though, since there was a big show in the United
States that conveys the range of his achievements.
"Louis Comfort Tiffany: An Artist for the Ages" does just that.
This exciting exhibition has both familiar highlights and less
well-known works. This means not only stained glass lamps and
flower-form vases, but lava glass and wallpaper, too.
The exhibition is at the Toledo Museum of Art from February 2 to
April 20, and will afterwards travel to the Dallas Museum of Art
and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
Tiffany was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, a prominent New
York jeweler. It was young Tiffany's ambition to be a painter, so
he studied with George Inness (1825-1894) and became acquainted
with other American artists.
Until he was in his late 20s, there was little to distinguish
Tiffany from all the other young dilettantes in New York. There
were travels in Europe and North Africa, and visits to the
Centennial Exhibition to see the Japanese art. Occasionally, he
exhibited and sold his paintings, though he remained financially
dependent on his father.
By the late 1870s, Tiffany was working as an interior designer.
He was a persuasive man, judging by the people who hired him at
the start of his career. He began near the top, working for
various businessmen and industrialists. By the 1880s, his client
list included Samuel Clemens and the art collectors Louisine and
Henry Osborne Havemeyer. His gift, which is still evident in
photographs more than a century later, was to create fantasy
interiors for serious people.
Tiffany's early use of opalescent glass is evident in this
balustrade section, 1890-91, that was designed for a patron's
private painting gallery.
A Fifth Avenue townhouse, his first major commission, was
inspired by Moorish and Asian styles. The drawing room had many of
the characteristics associated with Eastern interiors, like
Oriental carpets, fretwork and exotic tiles and ceramics, some of
which are on display in the exhibition. But there was nothing of
the sultan's harem about the room, thanks, in part, to the
Victorian details. Hence, the stained glass windows, the piano and
the potted plants that would have also been found in a more soberly
decorated interior. Tiffany also liked to add the occasional
antique; in this case, an old roundabout chair incongruously placed
next to a Moorish table.
Some of the exotic elements were, moreover, based on forms
associated with export wares. Take the armchair, 1879, that was
modeled on a Seventeenth Century Indo Portuguese prototype. It is
made of holly, a hardwood then popular for high-end furniture,
and inlay with Mogul motifs. On the chair back there is a screen
of ornamental metalwork inset with pieces of glass. The design
was unconventional but familiar, and it was wholly suitable for a
drawing room.
