>The Magic of Tiffany

>Turn back the clock to the late 1800s and imagine that electricity is something you’ve only heard about. Then imagine that — if you are rich enough — you’ve bought your first electric lamp, one with a shade that directs the light through whimsical designs created from pieced glass: “drawings” of dragonflies or spider webs, peacock feathers or peonies. As you stare at the lamp, you know you have never seen anything quite so sensual, vivid, exotic or distinct. Do that and you will understand the thousands of buyers who made Louis Comfort Tiffany the most sought-after artist, craftsman and interior designer of his time. From the 1880s to the 1930s, Tiffany and his studios produced work that revolutionized the art of glassmaking and married fine art to craftsmanship in American homes.

In spite of the fame of his glass lamps — the term Tiffany lamp is now an accepted generic name for any leaded lamp — Tiffany’s passion lay in stained-glass windows (his studios produced some 20,000) and hand-blown glass objects. The son of the founder of the famous New York silver and jewelry firm Tiffany & Co., Tiffany took his rich beginnings and went his own way, beginning his career as a painter abroad and then learning to “paint” with glass as no other American artist ever had.

“Because he was trained as a painter, he never recognized the limitations of glass the way a glassmaker would,” says Elizabeth DeRosa, an independent curator and adjunct professor at Cooper Hewitt Graduate Program in the History of Decorative Arts in New York City. “He was always experimenting.” He experimented with color, with materials, with shape and with process. Says Elizabeth, “He was the Cecil B. DeMille of the arts world.”

In 1885 he founded the Tiffany Glass Company (expanded and renamed Tiffany Studios in 1900), employing thousands of workers until it closed in 1928. Says Martin Eidelberg, a professor of art history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.: “He would bring in colored sketches and say to his workmen, ‘Work this up.'” But not one piece ever left the studio without Tiffany’s approval.

“Tiffany’s work is as popular today as it was in his time and will ever be so because he captured in glass and light the essence of natural beauty,” says interior designer Michael Payne, owner of Michael Payne Design in Los Angeles and host of HGTV’s Designing for the Sexes. “I look at Tiffany pieces and say to myself, ‘It’s only stained glass, Michael,’ but then I get almost teary-eyed. You can only shake your head and say, ‘It’s magical.'”
 What survives today is the timelessness of Tiffany’s genius. “All current designers will have studied Tiffany,” Michael says. “They don’t just get out of bed and start knocking out glass. They all owe something to Tiffany, and most of them are saying, ‘If only my pieces could be as beautiful.'” 

Mooning over a Tiffany and owning one are two separate things. The pieces became hot commodities again in the 1950s when the Museum of American Craft in New York City held a retrospective of Tiffany’s work. Suddenly dealers were combing Grandma’s attic, and Tiffanys have sold for as much as $2.5 million. Most of the floral leaded-glass shades sell for $30,000 to $150,000, although the simpler geometric ones can start at a mere $15,000.

Tiffany was the first to color glass with metal oxides, a method that yielded a range of 5,000 colors, formulas whose secret he guarded. “It was not only the hue he came up with but the colors within a hue,” says Tiffany dealer Lary Matlick. “Within a hue of red, say, there was orange-red, yellow-red, blood-red. And by choosing different colors within a hue, Tiffany could create a flow of color,” he says. “When you look at a good Tiffany lamp, you see not one color but continuous movement and variations within that same color.”

If a million dollar Tiffany lamp is a bit out of your price range then consider a Tiffany-style reproduction.  Each is handcrafted with exacting standards based on the original Tiffany method. Sally Lee offers a full line of Tiffany-style lighting and window panels which will add instant class and whimsical charm to your home.

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