Tiffany’s Hand-Blown Glass

There’s something special about an object made by a team of artists instead of a machine. The irregularities make it unique.

Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glassworkers made what he called Favrile (hand-made, hand-blown) glass vases for people who lived around 1900, an age of industry and machines. The people of this time also wanted the art of the dawning twentieth century to be new and different than the art of the past.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the famous jeweler, was a young painter and interior decorator whose commissions included the White House.  Later, he was able to focus on his passion: glass. He experimented and learned from others, making glass with dimension. Metal gave glass an iridescent luster.

Tiffany designed gardens and drew inspiration from nature.

His company had made leaded glass windows that looked like paintings. The expensive windows decorated mansions of the very rich. He marketed these vases to a much wider audience.

Tiffany studied ancient glass in his travels to the Old World, and also at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, very close to his home. He loved the pockmarks and other deterioration that took place over centuries in the soil. He and his team created new vases with pockmarks and an ancient look he called Cypriote.

The one with the fish may be my favorite. This vase is empty.

You can see more vases at this link: Tiffany Favrile Glass: Masterworks from the Collection of Stanley and Dolores Sirott . The exhibit will be at the Huntington in San Marino, California, until February 26, 2018.