Tiffany Toothpicks

Louis Comfort Tiffany was undoubtedly the most influential and accomplished American decorative artist in the decades that spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Beyond glass, he worked in mediums that ranged from furniture and enameling to ceramics and metalware, with his Tiffany Studios producing highly collectible table lamps, vases, serveware and other objects.

The name Tiffany prompts thoughts of two things: splendid gifts in robin’s-egg blue boxes and exquisite stained glass. Charles Lewis Tiffany founded the former, and his son, Louis, is responsible for exemplars of the latter. 

By the time Louis Comfort Tiffany was born, the stationery and “fancy goods” emporium his father had established 11 years before had grown to become the most fashionable jewelry and luxury items store in New York. Tiffany fils declined to join the family business and pursued a career as an artist. He studied painting with several teachers, notably the scenic painter Samuel Colman, while spending long periods touring Europe and North Africa. Though he painted his entire career, visits to continental churches sparked a passionate interest in stained glass. Tiffany began experimenting with the material and in 1875 opened a glass factory-cum-laboratory in Corona, Queens — the core of what eventually became Tiffany Studios, a multimedia decorative-arts manufactory.

Tiffany developed a method in which colors were blended together in the molten state. Recalling the Old English word fabrile, meaning “hand-wrought,” he named the blown glass Favrile, a term that signified handmade glass of unique quality. In his glass designs, Tiffany embraced the emerging Art Nouveau movement and its sinuous, naturalistic forms and motifs. The pieces won Tiffany international fame. (Siegfried Bing, the Paris entrepreneur whose design store, L’Art Nouveau, gave the stylistic movement its name, was the leading European importer of Tiffany pieces.) 

By 1902, along with glass, Tiffany was designing stained-glass lamps and chandeliers as well as enameled metal vases, boxes and bowls, and items such as desk sets and candlesticks. Today such pieces epitomize the rich aesthetics of their era.

Antique Tiffany Studios table lamps are the most recognizable and the most prized. They range in price from $60,000 to upward of $2 million for intricate shade designs like the Dragonfly. Tiffany glass vases and bowls are generally priced from $1,000 to $30,000 depending on size, color, condition and form. Simpler accessories such as metal trays and small picture frames can fetch from $800 to $3,000. Tiffany design of any type is an emblem of taste and craftsmanship. As you will see on 1stDibs, Louis Comfort Tiffany ensured that each piece he and his company produced, magnificent or modest, was a work of art.

Find Louis Comfort Tiffany vases, serveware and other items on 1stDibs.

Whether you’re seeking glass dinner plates, centerpieces, platters and serveware or other items to elevate the dining experience or brighten the corners of your living room, bedroom or other spaces by displaying decorative pieces, find an extraordinary range of antique, new and vintage glass on 1stDibs.

Glassmaking is more than 4,000 years old. It is believed to have originated in Northern Mesopotamia, where carved glass objects were the result of a series of experiments led by potters or metalworkers. From there, the production of glass vases, bottles and other objects proliferated in Egypt under the reign of Thutmose III. Later, new glassmaking techniques took shape during the Hellenistic era, and glassblowing was invented in contemporary Israel. Then, on the island of Murano in Venice, Italy, modern art glass as we know it came to be.

Over the years, collectors of glass decorative objects or serveware have sought out distinctive antique and vintage pieces of the mid-century modern, Art Deco and Art Nouveau eras, with artisans such as Archimede Seguso, René Lalique and Émile Gallé of particular interest for the pioneering contributions they made to the respective styles in which they worked. Today, long-standing glassworks such as Barovier&Toso carry on the Venetian glasswork tradition, while modern furniture designers and sculptors such as Christophe Côme and Jeff Zimmerman elsewhere test the limits of the radical art form that is glassmaking.

From chandeliers to Luminarc stemware, find a collection of antique, new and vintage glass on 1stDibs.