LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY
by Thea Tweet
Louis Comfort Tiffany's birth in 1848 instantly made him eligible to preside over Tiffany and Company, the multi-million dollar diamond and silver business his father had built. Instead, at eighteen Louis announced that he wanted to become an artist, and he set about learning landscape painting from George Inness. After two years in Inness's studio, he went off to Egypt and Europe and spent the next five years studying art in a thoroughly undisciplined way. Yet he became quite a respectable painter, and his Duane Street, New York is often cited as a forerunner of the Ashcan School. On the whole, though, he had more in common with the work of Winslow Homer.
Before long Louis realized that his forte was interior decoration, and he set up his own business. He specialized in glassware, but also made tiles and mosaics and designed bronze hanging lamps.
Tiffany himself was neither graduate chemist nor glass blower, but he hired expert chemists and craftsmen to realize his designs, and he supervised them closely. His first successes were with stained glass windows. He avoided painted decoration, striving for a jewel-like effect in his work. Chemicals were added at various stages of glassmaking, and the glass was manipulated as it cooled to alter its thickness. To achieve a kaleidoscope effect, as the Gallery's window, Sunset Scene (93.28) clearly illustrates, he had pieces of broken glass placed in a glass bed; then molten glass was poured over them. His experience as a landscape painter had taught him perspective, and he learned to use glass to gain that effect. The windows he designed for churches and chapels often had landscapes rather than religious scenes as their subject.
Tiffany's greatest achievement technically was in making what he called "favrile" glass. In 1880 he received a patent for his process. In this method, gold chloride (AuC13) was used both in suspension and sprayed on the surface, creating a satin-like texture. The gold in the glass was brought to the surface by a reducing flame. Tiffany made his gold chloride by melting $20 gold pieces in a solution of nitric and hydrochloric acid (aqua regia), which was used for the spray. Modern craftsmen would no doubt use scrap gold, but Tiffany had no for regard for expense when he wanted a special effect. This literally was "The Gilded Age"!
Tiffany was diligent in maintaining the integrity of his products. Everything not commissioned was offered for sale on consignment to dealers for three months. Unsold items were offered to another dealer. Anything still unsold was returned to Tiffany and destroyed. However, he did sell some of his glass to other artists who used it to execute their own designs. Consequently, much inferior work has been sold as Tiffany.
Tiffany's work was popular not only in New York but in such places as Washington, D.C., where he decorated rooms in the White House for President Arthur in a style combining oriental and gothic elements. When Teddy Roosevelt came to the White House, one of the first orders he gave was to tear down a Tiffany glass screen. This was the first of many losses of Tiffany's work.
Tiffany and Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect, are usually considered the founders of Art Nouveau in the United States. Both men used decorative motifs deriving from natural plant forms, and preferred curvilinear to straight lines. When Frank Lloyd Wright broke away from Sullivan, he also rejected the Art Nouveau aesthetic and was outspoken in this scorn of Tiffany's decorating style.
The famed Armory Show of 1913 marked the beginning of a change of taste in art and decoration in America. By the time of his death in 1933, Tiffany's style had fallen out of favor, his $13 million inheritance had been reduced to one million, and his business went bankrupt. Fortunately he had already established the Tiffany Foundation as an art colony for young artists looking for freedom in their work. It was thirty years after his death before Tiffany began to receive the recognition he deserved.
MAG’s Tiffany window was removed from a mausoleum at Mt. Hope cemetery to keep it safe from vandals.. The preservation of the window would have pleased Tiffany. Its prominent location near the tour entrance would have delighted him.
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