TIFFANY GLASS: A PASSION FOR COLOUR

Enthusiasm for the work of American glass artist Louis C. Tiffany (1848-1933) has never dimmed since his work was brought back to the public’s attention in the 1950s. In Tiffany’s heyday, from the late 1880s until the first years of the new century, Tiffany glass and windows were considered very prestigious, and his name was known around the world. After World War I, however, the rich colour and designs of Tiffany glass fell out of favour, as his work became associated with a bygone era. But by the late 1950s, collectors began to take note of the unique, experimental glass of the Tiffany firm, museums began to dust off their Tiffany pieces, and dealers joined the search for Tiffany Favrile glass, which had brought renown to the artist not only in North America, but also in European capitals like Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Saint Petersburg.

The Museum’s recent acquisition of eighteen documented stained glass windows from the Erskine and American Church served as the catalyst for this exhibition devoted to the finest production of Tiffany glass – the first Tiffany exhibition of this magnitude to be presented in Canada. It will highlight the American designer’s remarkable contribution to the design and technology of glass through 180 works, including his unique vases, his famous lamps, an imposing collection of ecclesiastical and secular stained glass, paintings and mosaics, as well as original drawings from the Tiffany studios.

TIFFANY'S YOUTH

The son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, who founded the celebrated jewellery and silverware firm Tiffany & Co., Louis C. Tiffany grew up in a milieu where his interest in art was nurtured. Rather than entering the family firm, Tiffany trained as a painter in New York and Paris. He also showed a marked talent for interior design and gradually turned his attention away from easel painting to set up a business as a decorator. He received commissions to decorate the churches and homes of influential clients in New York and across the United States, including the White House in 1882, during Chester A. Arthur’s presidency. His interiors revealed a flair for the dramatic, with coloured glass integrated into the windows, fireplace mantels, lighting and even ornate firescreens that were inspired by the metalwork he had seen on his trips to the Near East.

CAPTIVATED BY GLASS

As a young man, Tiffany revelled in the rich hues of Byzantine glass mosaics and the medieval stained glass of Chartres cathedral. He even admired the transmission of light through the imperfect glass of old claret bottles and was curious to experiment with a material that constantly changed in colour and brilliance under natural or artificial light. In late 1892 or early 1893, Tiffany opened his own glass furnace and workshop in Corona, Long Island, under an English glass manager, Arthur J. Nash. This enabled Tiffany to produce his own broad range of colours and textures of glass for the stained glass windows his firm made for churches and residences across North America during this period often referred to as the "Stained Glass Decades."

It was also at this time that Tiffany developed his famous "Favrile" glass (a term coined by Tiffany after the Latin fabrilis, meaning handworked). The Tiffany craftsmen blew the molten glass, stretched and pulled it into innovative, irregular forms for vases and bowls that were sold at the firm’s Madison Avenue showroom. Tiffany was fascinated by the abstract patterns of sinuous coloured filaments, the unexpected surface effects left by the molten glass as it oozed and flowed, and the sheer beauty of the vivid peacock blues and greens of the Favrile glass. A trademark of Tiffany glass is its iridescence – inspired by the spectrum of colour Tiffany admired on the eroded surfaces of ancient Greek and Roman vessels.

TIFFANY IN PARIS

Tiffany had special ties with Paris, a city he visited over and over again. He spoke excellent French and spent a year there as an art student from 1868 to 1869. It was there that he developed a taste for Japonisme and Orientalist themes. Tiffany also exhibited his paintings and later his glass works in the Paris salons, and he had a prominent display at the Paris World’s Fair of 1900.

From 1894 to about 1900, the Paris art dealer Siegfried Bing, owner of the Galerie L’Art Nouveau (from which the Art Nouveau style takes its name), was Tiffany’s exclusive representative in Europe. Bing was a great admirer and promoter of Tiffany’s work, exhibiting and selling his glass to many museums of the day, including the Musée du Luxembourg and the Musée des arts décoratifs, which has lent its best Tiffany vases to the exhibition. In his desire to integrate painting and decorative arts, Bing commissioned Tiffany to create stained glass windows from the designs of eleven French artists of the day. Only three windows from this commission are known today, and one, modelled after a watercolour by Toulouse-Lautrec, has been generously lent for the exhibition by the Musée d’Orsay. It is a work that has rarely been exhibited outside of France.

STAINED GLASS WINDOWS

The Tiffany studios made roughly five thousand windows over the fifty years of its production, from complex figural compositions to stock pattern representations of saints and angels. Ecclesiastical windows were a mainstay of the firm’s production. The exhibition offers an opportunity to see all the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Tiffany windows up close, before they are reinstalled in the Bourgie Concert Hall. The windows are majestic when viewed from afar, but at eye level, visitors will be able to observe the great range of textures and subtle colours and gain an appreciation for the care that has gone into the selection of each piece of glass. The exhibition will present other outstanding examples of Tiffany windows, such as the astonishingly abstract window Tiffany made for his own apartment in about 1880 (on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art) or the Mermaid window created for a sugar magnate’s house in Hawaii (private collection), or the exquisite Magnolia window that was bought by a Russian collector from Tiffany’s display at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900 (State Hermitage Museum).

INSPIRED BY NATURE

In his own painting, Tiffany was especially adept at depicting flowers and foliage, and he carried his keen observation of nature into his glass production. He urged his artists to draw inspiration from the diaphanous wings of insects, the bold striations in rocks and the flowers in Tiffany’s own garden, like the wisteria and the magnolia that became hallmarks of Tiffany glass. Tiffany’s love of nature was especially apparent in the many variations of flowers in the firm’s lamps, which were often made after the designs of the talented women artists who worked behind the scenes. Among the most delicate of Tiffany vases are the flower form shapes in which the stem rises up from a bulbous base, swells out, and finally opens fully into bloom. In his 1896 book La culture artistique en Amérique, Siegfried Bing wrote most eloquently on the evocation of nature in Tiffany’s Favrile glass vessels:

Here what he wanted [was] the discreet calm of semi-opaque tones in which, embedded within the glass itself, he simulated fine veins, filaments, and trails of color similar to the delicate nuances in the skin of fruit, the petal of a flower, the veins of an autumn leaf. From the artist’s hands emerged gourds, the sinuous elegance of flexible stems, half-open calices that, without slavishly copying nature, took on the unexpected aspect of freely unfolding forms.

This exhibition has been made possible through the generosity of many private collectors and major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, which has lent over forty glass works and drawings to the show.

Rosalind Pepall
Chief Curator
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts



	About Louis C. Tiffany


	Chronology




Louis C. Tiffany, member of the Century Club, about 1870.



Charles Lewis Tiffany (left) in his store, about 1887.