Louis Comfort Tiffany
Master of the glass lamp.
Louis Comfort Tiffany developed opalescent glass and made lamps, windows and jewellery in the Art Nouveau style.
Louis Comfort Tiffany was born in New York in 1848, the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of the jewellers Tiffany & Co. He chose not to join the family business and instead studied painting with the landscape painters George Inness and Samuel Colman. He travelled in Europe and North Africa and painted Orientalist subjects. The journeys awakened a lifelong interest in colour, light and Islamic art.
In the late 1870s he began working in interior decoration and, together with the textile artist Candace Wheeler among others, founded the firm Associated Artists. They decorated wealthy homes in New York and in 1882 also rooms in the White House. At the same time he began experimenting with glass. He wanted the colour to be in the glass itself, not painted on, and in 1881 he patented an opalescent window glass with milky, shifting tones.
In 1894 he registered the name Favrile for a hand-blown iridescent glass, with a shimmering surface reminiscent of ancient glass that has lain in the ground. His workshops made vases, mosaics, stained-glass windows and, from the 1890s, the famous lamps with shades of hundreds of pieces of coloured glass joined with copper foil. Only in 2007 did it become widely known that many of the best-known lamps, such as the dragonfly and the wisteria, were designed by Clara Driscoll, who headed a department of women glass cutters.
Tiffany built a chapel installation for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and later made a large glass curtain for the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. He had his country estate, Laurelton Hall on Long Island, built as a total work of art, but the house burned down in 1957. After his father's death in 1902 he became artistic director of Tiffany & Co.
Tiffany died in 1933, when Art Nouveau had long since gone out of fashion. His glass was rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s and is now sought after by collectors. The largest collection, including the reconstructed chapel, is in the Morse Museum in Winter Park, Florida. He is regarded as America's foremost Art Nouveau artist.