Signpost 6: New York - Fabulous Favrile

If London launched Art Nouveau waves across Europe, by the time they crossed the Atlantic they caused barely a ripple. Two American architects are often claimed by the Art Nouveau movement. Organic forms explicitly emerged in the architecture of Louis Sullivan. And scholars still debate whether Frank Lloyd Wright influenced the Glasgow School and Vienna Secession or vice versa. However, the indisputable bearer of the American Art Nouveau torch was Louis Comfort Tiffany, scion of the jewelry empire. Tiffany trained in Europe as a painter but found his greater talent and success in interior design and decorative arts. He formed a number of decoration partnerships that produced sophisticated, fashionable interiors. His workshops, particularly his glass works, would revolutionize techniques of glass blowing. Although he aligned his work with European Art Nouveau artists through participation in international exhibitions and gallery shows, Tiffany was cagey about his association with the term Art Nouveau. Like the English, Americans were unsure about the style with its connotations of permissiveness, amorality, and social change.

As in Europe’s Art Nouveau centers, Tiffany’s design practice was centered in a new, sophisticated urbanism. He formed Associated Artists in 1879 in collaboration with other designers and specialists, like textile designer Candace Wheeler.  They completed residential commissions for America’s titans of industry and culture as well as civic buildings including New York’s Seventh Regiment Armory and even parts of the White House in 1882. In executing those commissions, he wholly embraced the new art philosophy of “total work of art,” producing furniture, wall coverings, textiles, stained glass, fixtures, and decorative objects to establish a complete look for a room or house. He also drew on many exotic sources, Japanese, Islamic, Celtic, and Native American, as well as a range of flora and fauna, borrowing some of those influences from designers at his father’s firm.

Glass Screen in Entrance Hall in White House; Associated Artists, 1882

Photo credit: By Frances Benjamin Johnston - http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/special/renovation-1873.htm via White House Historical Association from the Library of Congress, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10784609

Tiffany started working in stained glass in the 1880s as a decorative element. In 1893, he built a workshop in Corona, NY, to start working with blown glass, possibly starting with lampshades, to produce objects that appropriately completed his interiors. He imported Arthur Nash, a skilled glass blower from Stourbridge, England, to run the workshop. Inspired by the “art glass” movement happening at the time, Tiffany with Nash and a glass chemist began experimenting with a wide range of colors and techniques that vastly increased the palette and possibilities of glass. To utilize the new glass techniques, he populated his workshops with talented designers and workers, both men and women, although he reserved top billing on most work for himself. (Today, many scholars and museums will credit Tiffany along with the object’s designer in exhibitions and books.)

One of Tiffany’s most striking creations was Favrile glass, a name he adapted from the Old English “fabrile”, meaning hand made. His glass makers created the iridescent surface effect through a special chemical and firing process that Tiffany claimed as secret and proprietary. As is the American way, Tiffany tried to corner the market and filed a patent on Favrile. He even filed a lawsuit against Steuben Glassworks when they began marketing similar iridescent objects. However, European glass makers had patented their own form of iridescence before Tiffany and his lawsuit was unsuccessful. Ultimately there was plenty of market demand for the glowing glass to keep all companies in business for several decades. The popularity of iridescent glass corresponded with newly electrified interiors, with the—by our standards dim—incandescent light producing a warm, golden sparkle. The technique also played into Tiffany’s naturalism. While other glass artists depicted nature through images on the surface of their vessels, Tiffany’s fluid glass forms became organic objects in themselves, such the peacock vase, in which the iridescent strands within the glass appear as feathers.

Peacock vase, Tiffany Studios, c. 1893-96

Photo credit: © Metropolitan Museum of Art

In addition to Favrile, his innovations in stained glass and leaded glass shades were groundbreaking.  Dissatisfied with the range and quality of glass available for stained glass windows, he began experimenting with colors and textures, ultimately creating thousands of transparent and opaque colors, a veritable palette for painting images with glass. His workshops also created rippled glass to imitate fabric or water and mottled glass that could suggest sun-dappled foliage. As a result, Tiffany’s craftsmen could produce an image entirely from glass pieces, without using enameling or etching to add detail or definition.

Window from Rochroane Castle, Irvington-on-Hudson, NY, Tiffany Studios, designed by Agnes Northrop, 1905

Photo credit: © Corning Museum of Glass

Detail from Rochroane Castle window, Tiffany Studios, designed by Agnes Northrop, 1905

Photo credit: © Corning Museum of Glass

To further enhance his interiors, he applied his stained glass innovations to leaded glass lampshades. Aligning closely with Art Nouveau principles, the shades depicted dragonflies, wisteria, poppies, daffodils, and a wide range of other flora and fauna. The designers often created bronze lamp bases that could be as simple as a column or as complex as a branching tree trunk. In one version of the dragonfly lamp, designed by Clara Driscoll, lily pads support of thick column of reeds on which the insects appear to alight.

Dragonfly lamp, Tiffany Studios, designed by Clara Driscoll, c. 1902-06

Photo credit: John Faier © The Richard H. Driehaus Museum

Unlike his European counterparts, Louis Comfort Tiffany did not transform cityscapes with new architecture. He was master of interior realms, many of which have unfortunately disappeared or remain only in fragments. Yet while in operation, Tiffany Studios were prolific. Hundreds of windows still grace churches, universities, and commercial buildings. Glass mosaics remain like the magnificent Dream Garden in Philadelphia’s Curtiss Building. And while his work went out of fashion in the mid-twentieth century, collectors today compete for the best of the decorative objects. The lamps are among the most famous and valuable. Examples can sell at auction for seven-figure sums. Over one hundred years later, Tiffany is still catering to the elites.

The Dream Garden, Maxfield Parrish and Tiffany Studios, glass mosaic, 1914-16

Photo credit: © Pennsylvania Museum of Fine Arts