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Louis Comfort Tiffany (February 18, 1848 – January 17, 1933) 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.
Louis was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany and Company. Louis 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, jewelry, enamels and metalwork.
He went to school at the Eagleswood Military Academy in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Louis Comfort Tiffany started out as a painter. His first artistic training was as a painter, studying under George Inness and Samuel Colman in New York City, and Léon Bailly in Paris. He became interested in glassmaking from about 1875 and worked at several glasshouses in Brooklyn between then and 1878. The first Tiffany Glass Company was incorporated on December 1, 1885, which in 1902 became known as the Tiffany Studios.
In the beginning of his career, Tiffany 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. 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. 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. 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. In 1893, his company also introduced the term, Favrile in conjunction with his first production of blown glass at his new glass factory. 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. Tiffany's 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.
The Tiffany Company sold many products produced by the studios. He became Artistic Director of Tiffany & Co. after his father's death in 1902. The Tiffany Studios remained in business until 1932. Louis Comfort Tiffany died on January 17, 1933, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
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 and lamps.
Biography from Wikipedia |
