The Tiffany Lamp and Coloured Glass

The Tiffany lamp is a table lamp with a shade of hundreds of pieces of coloured glass, joined with copper foil instead of lead came. It was created by Louis Comfort Tiffany’s studio in New York around 1895–1930, and many of the best-known models were designed by Clara Driscoll and her women glass cutters.

Facts

Tiffany and glass

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) was the son of the jeweller Charles Lewis Tiffany. He began as a painter but from the 1870s devoted himself to interiors and glass, and within Art Nouveau he became one of America’s best-known designers. Read more about him under Tiffany. His ideas came partly from the Arts and Crafts movement: he wanted to make craft into art. Among other things he decorated parts of the White House in 1882–83, and a chapel he created for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 made him known to a large public.

Tiffany wanted glass with colour in the body of the glass itself, not painted. He had metal oxides mixed into the melt and created glass that shimmered like butterfly wings. He patented it in 1894 under the name Favrile, from an old English word for hand-made. See the Favrile vase, which shows the glass’s shimmering surface.

The lamp takes shape

When electric light became common, after Edison’s light bulb of 1879, new kinds of lamp were needed. Tiffany saw that coloured glass could make a shade that glowed in colour. The Tiffany lamp came into use around 1895 and became popular after the turn of the century.

The technique differed from that of church windows. There the glass is joined with lead came, which is thick and rigid. Tiffany instead laid thin copper foil around each piece of glass and soldered the pieces together. That made it possible to join small pieces and to bend the shade into dome and flower shapes. A large shade could consist of several hundred pieces. The result was a warm, coloured glow that differed from the white shades of the age of gas and oil lamps, and the room was filled with a soft, shifting tone.

Clara Driscoll and the glass cutters

For a long time only Tiffany himself was named. Letters that came to light in the 2000s showed that Clara Driscoll (1861–1944) led the department where women chose and cut the pieces of glass, and that she designed, among others, Wisteria and Dragonfly, two of the best-known models. The women were called the Tiffany Girls and had to leave the work if they married.

The motifs are taken from nature: wisteria, dragonflies, poppies, peonies and daylilies. The shade may sit on a bronze base formed as a tree trunk or a stalk, and the whole lamp becomes a small sculpture. The patterns show the features of Art Nouveau, with soft lines and plant forms. Compare with the glass art of René Lalique and with the stricter forms of the Wiener Werkstätte.

Genuine and copy

Tiffany Studios went bankrupt in 1932, and the fashion for the lamps cooled. They were long seen as old-fashioned kitsch but were rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s, when prices rose sharply. That is why there are many copies and imitations today.

A genuine lamp usually bears a stamp, Tiffany Studios New York, and a number under the base and sometimes on the shade. The glass should have deep colour, with variations within each piece, and the solder lines should be even. But even stamps have been forged, so a purchase should always be checked by an expert. Switch the lamp on as well: in a genuine lamp the glass gives clear shifts of colour in the light, whereas a copy often looks flat and monochrome.

How to recognise it

Exercise

How are the pieces of glass joined in a Tiffany lamp?