Description
We all know Tiffany and Company—of the robin’s egg blue box—but how many people understand that there were two Tiffanys, father and son, whose businesses were separate but entwined? The firms of father (Charles Lewis) and son (Louis Comfort) exhibited side by side at the World’s Fair of 1900 in Paris. At his father’s death, Louis Comfort Tiffany, a multi-faceted artist, took the helm of his father’s firm. He trained as a painter, specializing in orientalist scenes, and worked as an interior decorator before turning his attention to glass in the 1880s. Tiffany was a trailblazer in both glass-making and glass design. Later he added ceramics and jewelry design to his repertoire. This lecture will focus on glass, the medium Tiffany Studios is best-known for today, Tiffany’s experiments in the medium, his favrile glass, his windows, his lamps and his reputation. (For a related class, see class #255.)