Louis Comfort Tiffany

A gorgeous Arts & Crafts or Art Nouveau period Favrile iridescent art glass floriform bowl with flared and ruffled edge By Louis Comfort Tiffany for Tiffany Studios (signed to the u...

A gorgeous Arts & Crafts or Art Nouveau period Favrile iridescent art glass bowl with scalloped edge By Louis Comfort Tiffany for Tiffany Studios (signed to the underside) USA, Cir...

A gorgeous Arts & Crafts or Art Nouveau period Favrile iridescent art glass finger bowl with ruffled edge By Louis Comfort Tiffany for Tiffany Studios (signed to the underside) USA...

An attractive early 20th Century American iridescent glass vase decorated with a leaf on trailing vine design with excellent petrol iridescence against a golden field, signed L C Tiffany Favrile and numbered to base. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Height: 23 cm Condition: Very Good Condition with slight signs of wear Circa: 1905 Materials: Iridescent Coloured Glass SKU: 6668 ABOUT Louis Comfort Tiffany Louis Comfort Tiffany (February 18, 1848 – January 17, 1933) was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. Tiffany 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, jewellery, enamels and metalwork. Early Life He was born in New York City, New York, the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany and Company; and Harriet Olivia Avery Young. He attended school at Pennsylvania Military Academy in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and Eagleswood Military Academy in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. His 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 1866-67 and with salon painter Leon-Adolphe-Auguste Belly in 1868-69. Belly’s landscape paintings had a great influence on Tiffany. Career Louis started out as a painter, but became interested in glassmaking from about 1875 and worked at several glasshouses in Brooklyn between then and 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 was short-lived, lasting only four years. The group made designs for wallpaper, furniture, and textiles. He later opened his own glass factory in Corona, New York, determined to provide designs that improved the quality of contemporary glass. Tiffany’s leadership and talent, as well as his father’s money and connections, led this business to thrive. In 1881 Tiffany did the interior design of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, which still remains, but the new firm’s most notable work came in 1882 when President Chester Alan Arthur refused to move into the White House until it had been redecorated. He commissioned Tiffany, who had begun to make a name for himself in New York society for the firm’s interior design work, to redo the state rooms, which Arthur found charmless. He worked on the East Room, the Blue Room, the Red Room, the State Dining Room and the Entrance Hall, refurnishing, repainting in decorative patterns, installing newly designed mantelpieces, changing to wallpaper with dense patterns and, of course, adding Tiffany glass to gaslight fixtures, windows and adding an opalescent floor-to-ceiling glass screen in the Entrance Hall. The Tiffany screen and other Victorian additions were all removed in the Roosevelt renovations of 1902, which restored the White House interiors to Federal style in keeping with its architecture. A desire to concentrate on art in glass led to the breakup of the firm in 1885 when Tiffany chose to establish his own glassmaking firm that same year. The first Tiffany Glass Company was incorporated December 1, 1885 and in 1902 became known as the Tiffany Studios. In the beginning of his career, he 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. He developed 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, that had been the dominant method of creating stained glass for hundreds of years in Europe. (The First Presbyterian Church building of 1905 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is unique in that it uses Tiffany windows that partially make use of painted glass.) Use of the colored glass itself to create stained glass pictures was motivated by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and its leader William Morris in England. Fellow artists and glassmakers Oliver Kimberly and Frank Duffner, founders of the Duffner and Kimberly Company and John La Farge were Tiffany’s chief competitors in this new American style of stained glass. Tiffany, Duffner and Kimberly, along with La Farge, had learned their craft at the same glasshouses in Brooklyn in the late 1870s. In 1889 at the Paris Exposition, he is said to have been “Overwhelmed” by the glass work of Émile Gallé, French Art Nouveau artisan. He also met artist Alphonse Mucha. In 1893, Tiffany built a new factory called the Stourbridge Glass Company, later called Tiffany Glass Furnaces, which was located in Corona, Queens, New York, hiring the Englishman Arthur J. Nash to oversee it. In 1893, his company also introduced the term Favrilein 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 Exposition Universelle (1900) in Paris, he won a gold medal with his stained glass windows The Four Seasons He trademarked Favrile (from the old French word for handmade) on November 13, 1894. He later used this word to apply to all of his glass, enamel and pottery. His 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. Recent scholarship led by Rutgers professor Martin Eidelberg suggests that a team of talented single women designers – sometimes referred to as the “Tiffany Girls” – led by Clara Driscoll played a big role in designing many of the floral patterns on the famous Tiffany...

A gorgeous Arts & Crafts or Art Deco period enameled footed dish or bowl By Louis Comfort Tiffany Furnaces Inc. (signed to the underside) USA, Circa 1920s Measures: 7.88"W x 7.88"...

A gorgeous Arts & Crafts or Art Nouveau period Favrile iridescent art glass scalloped bowl By Louis Comfort Tiffany for Tiffany Studios (signed to the underside) USA, Circa 1900 M...

Beautiful early 20th century Tiffany Favrille glass boudoir lamp. The lamp features a conical glass shade and baluster base with gold/amber "Arabian" pattern discoloration and applie...

A gorgeous Arts & Crafts or Art Nouveau period Favrile iridescent art glass scalloped bowl By Louis Comfort Tiffany for Tiffany Studios (signed to the underside) USA, Circa 1900 M...