Louis Comfort Tiffany is best known today for his leaded glass lamps and stained glass windows. The Art Nouveau style his work embodied has enjoyed a resurgence in this country; his works now command fabulous sums at auction. Yet many find Tiffany to be a rather vague figure, sometimes confused with his jeweler father, Charles Lewis Tiffany, or indeed almost personifying a generic description for any leaded glass lamp.
Louis C. Tiffany was a curious mixture of artist, businessman, inventor, promoter, socialite, philosopher, and teacher. Much of his career developed in response to several big challenges in his life. First, there was an initial need to establish a personal and professional reputation. He accomplished this by providing interior design for both individuals and institutions, among them Mark Twain and President Chester Arthur. Second, there was a desire to shape mass taste by producing and then selling products of his workshops, marketing a variety of goods that reflected his preferences and technical experiments. And third, he wished to provide a legacy, to establish a permanent mark of his personality on the art life of his country.
In some ways his desire to produce art for the masses in the forms of his favrile glass and his leaded glass lamps conflicted with his goal of providing an artistic legacy. He worried about being too commercial. The lamps were produced in multiple, rather than as one-of-a-kind artistic works. However, his lamps were produced for a seemingly insatiable market. Not many could afford his windows, but many in the middle class could afford these lamps which represented a new source of illumination independent of daylight. He began fabricating the lamps in 1885, with the majority of them being made between 1895 and 1920. It was not until 1899 that Tiffany publicly introduced the lamps for sale.
As his lamp designs progressed, his use of light, color and nature assumed even greater significance. For many, Tiffany is the outstanding exponent of the American Art Nouveau style because of his use of flowing lines and organic references to nature. In his lamps we see the motifs of wisteria, jack-in-the-pulpit, peacock feathers, spider's webs, and more.
Among the many Tiffany-style lamps we carry at AAImporting.com some of our most popular designs include accurate reproductions of the many dragonfly styles. As in all Tiffany shades the shapes vary from dome to cone to globe shape. Some have a straight bottom edge while others of later design have an irregular bottom edge. Some have overlapped wings; some have touching wings. Our lamp 50032 has an irregular bottom edge incorporating maple leaves into the design of the shade. 50031 has hanging head dragonflies with their heads at the irregular bottom edge of the shade. The hanging head dragonfly shade was designed by Tiffany artist Clara Driscoll, who received recognition for her creation at the 1900 Paris Exhibition.
In his work Tiffany wished to surround himself with talented people whom he educated through exposure to both master craftsmen and beautiful objects. To this end, Tiffany's glass house employed teams of workers organized as "shops" composed of a master craftsman, called a gaffer, and a team of assistants with precise roles. Tiffany found that the most effective way to disseminate his ideas was to train his own apprentices. At first the hiring of too many boys caused Tiffany's only strike, due to the labor surplus and their young age. He immediately let the boys go and replaced them with young women from the local art schools. However, as a man obsessed with excellence, he could be an arbitrary, high-handed and uncompromising employer.
Another well-known Tiffany style is the glass lily lamp. See our lamp 11550, the 6 light lily lamp, which is similar to Tiffany's lily lamps. An interesting point about this lamp is that the beautifully carved leaves covering the platform base are, strangely enough, not the long narrow leaves of the garden lily, whose blossoms the shade represents, but rather the round leaves of the water lily, which belongs to quite a different botanical group.
By Tiffany's death in 1933, the popularity of his elaborate lamps declined with the rise of Art Moderne and Expressionism. For two decades the designs of Tiffany were forgotten. It was not until the first retrospective show in 1958 that his objects were rediscovered by museums and collectors. Awareness of Tiffany's craftsmanship escalated with an Art Nouveau show in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art. Today the designs of Louis Comfort Tiffany are honored and treasured around the world, confirming Tiffany's legacy as a visionary of Art Nouveau design.
