If there is one New York brand name that conjures up images of supreme luxury and exuberant excess, it must be Tiffany. The very name sounds like rolling over in velvet. Decorator and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany defined the height of style for wealthy, cultured New Yorkers at the end of the 19th century. The family name lives on in the exclusive Fifth Avenue jewellery store, Tiffany & Company, founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany, the designer's father.
Louis Comfort Tiffany captured the artistic spirit of America's Gilded Age. His astonishingly wide range of work includes technically brilliant stained glass windows, ornate lamps and jewellery. The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York is now celebrating the artist with an exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of his birth.
A leader in American design, Louis Comfort Tiffany (18481933) grew up during a time of intense experimentation in the arts. His decorative art reached its peak at the same time as art nouveau burst upon Europe in the mid-1890s.
He began life as a painter, travelling to Ireland, England, France and Italy, sketching landscapes. Later he turned towards design, perhaps inspired by the gold and silver craftsmanship he observed at his father's jewellery firm. Eventually, the artist would become renowned as a painter in glass.
Tiffany participated in the Aesthetic Movement, which gave a new, higher status to the decorative arts. Along with other members of the movement, he was attracted to exotic designs from Japan, North Africa and the Islamic world. During a career which spanned more than half a century, Tiffany worked with a vast range of materials. At the Tiffany Studios he founded at Madison Avenue, New York, he assembled a skilled team including glassmakers, metal workers, stonemasons, wood-carvers, textile workers and potters. His cave-like studios, complete with a forest of glass lanterns suspended from the ceiling, was described as "a dream: Arabian Nights in New York". The artist oversaw every design, ensuring that everything produced by the studio carried his own distinctive style.
Tiffany apparently had little time for the romantic image of an artist starving in his garret. He had a canny ability to market his wares, publicising his art at the great international fairs of the late 19th century. His list of "favoured clients" reads like a Who's Who of leading business tycoons and society hosts in the early 1900s. Tiffany's studios flourished at a time of booming prosperity. As well as producing one-off luxury products to decorate the homes of the wealthy, Tiffany had a thriving practice designing interiors for theatres, museums and churches.
From the 1870s and early 1890s, Tiffany's ecclesiastical work included stunning stained glass windows, which did more than anything else to spread his reputation. Along with his rival, John La Farge, Tiffany revolutionised the art of stained glass. Together they introduced a more vivid palette to a craft which had remained largely unchanged since medieval times.
Instead of depicting traditional biblical figures in his church windows, Tiffany began to use lush woodland scenes. One light-filled window, Magnolias and Irises, designed for a Brooklyn mausoleum, depicts a gorgeous spray of blooms in shades of deep purple, pale pink and lavender.
Tiffany's work was a riot of colour. "The sovereign importance of colour is only beginning to be realised," he wrote in 1917. "These light-vibrations have a subjective power and affect the mind and soul, producing feelings and ideas of their own."
The artist founded his own glass furnace at Queens, New York, and developed a new method of glass-making for ornamental vessels. He achieved subtle affects by blending different colours together in a molten state. He named the new technique, "Favrile", after the Old English word "fabrile" meaning hand-wrought. Tiffany won acclaim for the iridescence of his favrile vessels. One exquisite vase, which fans out in the form of a peacock feather, captures the glistening greens and blues of the bird's plumage.
After his father's death in 1902, Tiffany became vice-president and artistic director of the jewellery firm, Tiffany & Company. Inspired to produce his own jewellery, he began using semi-precious stones and platinum rather than the gold and silver associated with the company. In a book accompanying the Metropolitan exhibition, curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen describes the jewellery of Louis Comfort Tiffany as "revolutionary". The exhibition includes a delicate hair ornament, with two dragonflies of fiery opals resting on two dandelion seedballs in metal filigree. Tiffany's mission was to bring hand-crafted beautiful objects into the home. Of course, they were only affordable to elite clients. In later years, he applied his leaded-glass techniques to creating lampshades made of a mosaic of brightly coloured pieces. One lamp comprises an extraordinary cascade of water lily blossoms from the shade crown, supported by a bronze stand of broad, lily pads. The lamps were luxury goods, even if they were in the lower price range for Tiffany products. Huge demand led to many models of each lamp being produced. This duplication undermined Tiffany's goal of creating unique works of art. Tiffany remained ambivalent about the lamps, which are so closely associated with his style today.
Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibition is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York, until Jan 31st.
