Louis Comfort Tiffany
Louis Comfort Tiffany[Cleveland Institute of Art|] was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is associated with the art nouveau and aesthetic art movements. He was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists, which included Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, and Samuel Colman. Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewelry, enamels, and metalwork. He was the first design director at his family company, Tiffany & Co., founded by his father Charles Lewis Tiffany.
Early life and education
Tiffany was born in New York City, the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany and Company, and Harriet Olivia Avery Young. He attended school at Pennsylvania Military Academy in Chester, Pennsylvania, and Eagleswood Military Academy in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.Early career
Tiffany's first artistic training was as a painter, studying under George Inness in Eagleswood, New Jersey, and Samuel Colman in Irvington, New York. He also studied at the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1866 and 1867 and with salon painter Leon-Adolphe-Auguste Belly in 1868 and 1869. Belly's landscape paintings had a great influence on Tiffany.Although Tiffany started out as a painter, he became interested in glassmaking from about 1875 and worked at several glasshouses in Brooklyn until 1878. In 1879 he joined with Candace Wheeler, Samuel Colman, and Lockwood de Forest to form Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated American Artists. The business lasted only four years. The group made designs for wallpaper, furniture, and textiles. In 1881, Tiffany did the interior design of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, which still remains.
History of Tiffany Studios
After Tiffany had formed a partnership with Colman, Lockwood DeForest, and Candace Wheeler, and after having incorporated the interior decorating firm of L.C. Tiffany & Associated Artists, a desire to concentrate on art in glass led Tiffany to choose to establish his own glassmaking firm. The first Tiffany Glass Company was incorporated on December 1, 1885. It became the Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company in 1892, and the Tiffany Studios in 1900. He had used commercial glass houses for 19 years to supply his Manhattan showroom and clients, but wanted to be fully in charge of production and design security. Finally, in 1892 he founded his own glassworks, the Louis C. Tiffany Furnaces in Corona Queens. As a youth Tiffany had attended the Flushing Institute, on Roosevelt Avenue between Main and Union Streets, where Macy's department store now sits. Tiffany was keenly aware of the area's potential and for his furnaces to succeed, he needed to hire the town's pool of experienced immigrant workers, who were then mostly Italian, German, and Irish." Tiffany experimented with glass. Sand for glassmaking was abundantly available at nearby Oyster Bay. Tiffany would eventually oversee two hundred artisans. Among them, Clara Driscoll, whose dragonfly lamp won a prize in the 1900 Paris Exposition, was by 1904 one of the highest paid women in the world. Even some of Tiffany's artists were foreigners, such as Venetian-born Andrea Boldini, and both Englishmen Joseph Briggs and Arthur J. Nash.With Tiffany later opening his own glass factory in Corona, New York, he was determined to provide designs that improved the quality of contemporary glass. The factory was the old Tiffany Studios in Corona, Queens, at the southwest corner of 43rd Avenue and 97th place, where it was used to cast art sculptures of bronze designs for sculptors, and bronze architectural elements such as floor registers, door jambs, window casings, lamps, and sconces, most notably for Tiffany. The building had undergone a metamorphosis of name changes, beginning with the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, in 1892. In 1893, Tiffany built a new factory called the Stourbridge Glass Company, later called Tiffany Glass Furnaces, which was located in Corona, Queens, hiring the Englishman Arthur J. Nash to oversee it. In 1893, his company also introduced the term Favrile in conjunction with his first production of blown glass at his new glass factory. Some early examples of his lamps were exhibited in the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.
At the beginning of his career, Tiffany used cheap jelly jars and bottles because they had the mineral impurities that finer glass lacked. When he was unable to convince fine glassmakers to leave the impurities in, he began making his own glass. Tiffany used opalescent glass in a variety of colors and textures to create a unique style of stained glass. Tiffany acquired Stanford Bray's patent for the "copper foil" technique, which, by edging each piece of cut glass in copper foil and soldering the whole together to create his windows and lamps, made possible a level of detail previously unknown. This can be contrasted with the method of painting in enamels or glass paint on colorless glass, and then setting the glass pieces in lead channels, which had been the dominant method of creating stained glass for hundreds of years in Europe.
Tiffany trademarked Favrile on November 13, 1894. He later used this word to apply to all of his glass, enamel and pottery. "Tiffany's favrile glass vases were based on Venetian glassmaking techniques mixed with ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern inspirations." Tiffany delved into glass-making with interest in Venetian glass-maker Antonio Salviati. Tiffany would study techniques from Salviati-trained glassmaker, Andrea Boldini. In 1902, Tiffany had been influenced by a Cypriote line of jewelry that his father, Charles Lewis Tiffany, had introduced earlier at the Turin World's Fair. He coined this particular line of favrile glass the Cypriote line.
Tiffany's first commercially produced lamps date from around 1895. Much of his company's production was in making stained glass windows and Tiffany lamps, but his company designed a complete range of interior decorations. At its peak, his factory employed more than 300 artisans. "Within this complex, Tiffany carried out experiments in glass colors and pottery glazing, perfected techniques of assembling stained glass windows." “By 1901, Tiffany was at the peak of his profession. "At his father's death in 1902, came into an inheritance equivalent today to more than $20 million. At age fifty-four, he was appointed the first design director and vice president of Tiffany & Co., taking on leading roles in the famous jewelry firm as well as continuing in his own enterprises. Also in 1902 Tiffany formally adopted the trademark Tiffany Studios for all works made in Corona, though the imprint had apparently been used earlier."
Tiffany Artisans
By 1902, Louis C. Tiffany had "several highly-gifted assistants working under his direction: Arthur J. Nash in glass; Clara Driscoll in leaded-glass lamps, windows, and mosaic design; Frederick Wilson in ecclesiastical stained-glass windows; and Julia Halsey Munson in enamels and jewelry design.Arthur J. Nash
Arthur J. Nash had been manager of a major glassworks in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, England. Tiffany persuaded Nash to join him in founding and heading a new firm, first called the Stourbridge Glass Company, and later in 1902 became known as the Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company in Corona, Queens. Arthur J. Nash became Tiffany's partner, as Nash applied the favrile the glass technique learned from his hometown of Stourbridge, England to the glassworks produced by Tiffany. Thereafter, its name evolved from being called the Stourbridge Glass Company in 1893, to the Tiffany Glass Furnaces, and finally to the Tiffany Studios. "Nash hired many more skilled English artisans. Tiffany's vision, Nash's management, and Charles Lewis Tiffany's financing resulted in a thriving operation. Stourbridge Glass Company was absorbed by Tiffany into the Tiffany Furnaces in 1902."In 1920, Tiffany's glass production was reorganized under Nash's son, A. Douglas Nash, as part of Louis C. Tiffany Furnaces, Inc.; and, as in the case of the metal shop under Arthur Nash's other son, Leslie Nash, the production turned to more commercial table and other wares." In 1922, Leslie Nash, a creative artist and designer in his own right, had a major influence on Tiffany's production. "In 1922, in the waning period of Tiffany Furnaces, Tiffany and Leslie Nash—inspired by motifs from King Tutankhamen's recently discovered tomb—designed an elaborate special order," for the wife of Chicago millionaire Cyrus McCormick. Tiffany sold his interests to the Nashes in 1928. Arthur Nash retired after 1918, and "with him retired the secrets of making the finest and most technically complicated types of Tiffany glass, which remain to this day one of the crowning achievements of the decorative arts in America."
Clara Driscoll
"A gifted unsung artist," Clara Driscoll was one of the many gifted artists employed by Tiffany. Driscoll was born in Tallmadge, Ohio. Driscoll was educated at theWestern Reserve School of Design for Women, and in 1888 moved to New York City to study at the Metropolitan Museum of Art School. "The turning point in her career came when she and her sister found employment at the Tiffany Glass Company in Manhattan." When Driscoll first began work at Tiffany's the firm was located at 333-35 Fourth Avenue, later renamed for its lush-green central median, Park Avenue. The names of the firm underwent a metamorphosis of name changes, as had Tiffany's glass operation with Nash: Louis C. Tiffany and Associated Artists, to Louis C. Tiffany & Co., and finally the Tiffany Glass Company. "As the name suggests, the company focused largely on leaded-glass windows but it also received commissions for interior decoration." From the late 1880s until about 1909, Driscoll supervised many of Tiffany's most celebrated leaded windows and mosaics. Since the common practice at the time was to limit female hires to unmarried status, Driscoll worked on and off on three separate occasions. During Driscoll's first term in 1892, a "Women's Glass Cutting Department" with six female employees under Driscoll's direction was created, and in two years, this had increased to thirty-five. Her third term at Tiffany's, "undoubtedly the most creative" tenure of her career, was the period many refer to as "the most prestigious commissions for leaded-glass windows and mosaics by her "Tiffany Girls." It was during this tenure that iconic pieces like the Dragonfly, Wisteria, and Poppy lamp shades were created. Undoubtedly, the magic in the artistic endeavors by Tiffany and his artisans can only be ascribed to the "harmony that existed between Tiffany and his workers."