Stained Glass - Table of Contents ............... Illustrated Architecture Dictionary

Louis C. Tiffany Stained Glass Windows in Western New York

Left: Louis C. Tiffany, c. 1908

Right: Christ Healing the Blind, Trinity Episcopal Church, Buffalo

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848ñ1933) embodied the artistic spirit of the Gilded Age. His career spanned more than half a century, from the 1870s to the mid-1920s - a time of experimentation, intense scrutiny of aesthetic ideals, and proliferation of new styles. Tiffany demonstrated a multitude of talents as an architect and painter and as a designer of interiors, landscapes, and all of the decorative arts. Together with his studios of artists, glassmakers, stonemasons, mosaicists, modelers, metalworkers, wood-carvers, potters, and textileworkers, Tiffany heralded in America the notion of continuity of design, orchestrating pattern, texture, color, and light to produce a single aesthetic expression. - Metropolitan Museum of Art

"[John] La Farge and [Louis C.] Tiffany, dissatisfied with the anemic colors and poor quality of available window glass, experimented with novel types of materials, achieving a more varied palette with richer hues and greater density. Working independently, they explored the pictorial, coloristic, and textural qualities of stained glass in new and daring ways that completely changed the look of the medium. By 1881, each artist had patented an opalescent glass, which has a milky, opaque, and sometimes rainbow-hued appearance when light shines through it. It was a uniquely American phenomenon that proved to be among the most important advances in decorative windows since the Middle Ages." - Louis Comfort Tiffany at the Metropolitan Museum. 1998 catalog

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass and is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewelry, enamels and metalwork.

Louis was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany and Company [jewelry and silverware]. He attended school at Pennsylvania Military Academ in Chester, Pennsylvania, and Eagleswood Military Academy in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. His first artistic training was as a painter, studying under George Inness and Samuel Colman in New York City and Léon Bailly in Paris.

Tiffany started out as a painter. He became interested in glassmaking from about 1875 and worked at several glasshouses in Brooklyn between then and 1878. Tiffany's companies:

"Tiffany's first collection of blown glass strongly expressed the Art Nouveau style. It was exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where it was an immediate success. The metallic iridescence, its chief characteristic, was inspired, he said, by the iridescence resulting from decay on on excavated Roman glass. Tiffany's glass had a silky, delicate patina over luminous colors. The metallic luster was a film of metal produced by exposing the glass to chemical sprays. It was believed, erroneously, that $20 gold pieces were dissolved in acid and used as a source for the gold in the metallic film." - Chloe Zerwick, A Short History of Glass, 1990, p. 98

At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, he won a gold medal with his stained glass windows The Four Seasons. Tiffany continued to make strong showings and receive awards at international fairs, notably Buffalo in 1901, Turin in 1902, and St. Louis in 1904. As a result, his work was widely known and acclaimed throughout America and around the world.

One of Tiffany's most important artists was René Théophile de Quélin.

Tiffany maintained close ties with the family firm. Tiffany & Company [jewelry and silverware] sold many products produced by the Tiffany Studios. He became Artistic Director of Tiffany & Co. after his father's death in 1902. The Tiffany Studios remained in business until 1932.

Tiffany's Obituary on January 18, 1933 in The New York Times

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida houses the world's most comprehensive collection of the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany including Tiffany jewelry, pottery, paintings, art glass, leaded-glass windows, lamps, and the chapel interior he designed for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

LaFarge and Tiffany: Opalescent 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. This can be contrasted with the method of painting in glass paint or enamels on colorless glass that had been the dominant method of creating stained glass for several hundred years in Europe.

In 1865, Tiffany traveled to Europe and in London he visited the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose extensive collection of Roman and Syrian glass made a deep impression on him. He admired the coloration of medieval glass and was convinced that the quality of contemporary glass could be improved upon.

In his own words, the "Rich tones are due in part to the use of pot metal full of impurities, and in part to the uneven thickness of the glass, but still more because the glass maker of that day abstained from the use of paint".

Tiffany was an interior designer, and in 1878 his interest turned towards the creation of stained glass, when he opened his own studio and glass foundry because he was unable to find the types of glass that he desired in interior decoration. His inventiveness both as a designer of windows and as a producer of the material with which to create them was to become renowned.

Tiffany wanted the glass itself to transmit texture and rich colors and he developed a type of glass he called Favrile.

- Wikipedia: Tiffany glass

John LaFarge was the first designer to incorporate opalescent glass into a window and received a patent for his new product on February 24, 1880. Tiffany received several patents for variations of the same opalescent process in November of the same year. La Farge was persuaded by Tiffany with hints of a future partnership and possible collaborations to waive his patent. The promises never materialized while competition and animosity grew between the two artists.

Fellow artist 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.


Eventually Tiffany became the darling of the Gilded Age industrialists and he created a glass and decorating studio that boasted more than a hundred workers. La Farge remained the lone artist who contracted out fabrication of his designs to smaller studios.

Both LaFarge and Tiffany secured their glass from the Kokomo glass factory in Kokomo, Indiana, after it became a reliable source for them in 1888.

Beyond Tiffany and La Farge, a plethora of stained glass studios developed in America around the turn of the century.

Other Tiffany innovations

Tiffany used unusual construction techniques and effects that produced stunning results. These included:the following:

Cutting the glass first, then cutting the leading

Use of strong colors

Layering colored glass over another colored glass

Application of color in streaks or dry-brushing the color on the surface

Drapery glass: pulling and pushing glass while it cools

Mottled glass - gives the impression of sunlight filtered through foliage

Confetti glass - embedded with tiny paper-thin flakes of glass in different colors,

Marbleized glass

Ripple glass - sometimes used to evoke movement of water

Plating

Jewels

Cames of varying widths - sometimes specially milled to replicate the natural textures of vines or branches

Copper cames - Using copper instead of lead for joining glass sections. Tiffany adapted the copper technique to construct lampshades and capitalized on the new innovation of electric lighting.

Sometimes eliminating figures (God, saints) - conferring religious significance to the landscape and natural world

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