Tiffany glass

Tiffany glass was the brainchild of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) who was the son of Charles Louis Tiffany, who had already established himself as a jeweller and silversmith with the foundation of the New York firm of Tiffany and Young in 1837.

Louis Tiffany

Although Louis Tiffany could simply have followed in his father’s footsteps and earned a substantial fortune by so doing, he preferred to study art, becoming a painter of landscapes. He visited Paris in 1868-69 and subsequently toured Spain and North Africa, where he became fascinated by Moorish and Islamic art. He was also influenced by Oriental art, to which he was introduced by Samuel Bing, a dealer in Paris, and Edward Moore, who was a designer for Tiffany and Young.

Tiffany realised that he did not have the skill to succeed as a painter, and Moore persuaded him to turn his attention to applied art and interior decoration. In 1879 he formed a partnership with two colleagues to form “Louis C Tiffany and Associated Artists”, and soon acquired a reputation as a pre-eminent decorator. He was chosen to re-decorate part of the White House in 1882-83 and, for this purpose, created a large screen in opalescent glass. Unfortunately this was destroyed in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt.

Tiffany’s interest in glass

Tiffany became increasingly interested in the possibilities of glass and broke up the partnership in order to concentrate on this medium. He had collected a lot of glassware on his travels and was fascinated by the colouring and texture of ancient glass. The iridescence that he admired had largely been caused by the glass absorbing metallic oxides when buried in the ground, and the pitted surfaces resulted from natural decomposition. Tiffany wanted to find ways to reproduce these effects in new glass.

Tiffany was particularly keen to produce glass in which the colour and decoration were integral and not applied to the surface. He always wanted to produce shapes that were natural for glass and not imitations of objects in bronze or porcelain. He was not always interested in perfect symmetry, because he admired the irregularities found in ancient glass.

The items he produced proved to be highly popular, and the demand was such that he could not possibly have made them all himself, although he kept a close eye on everything that left his factory. There is therefore a division between the experimental pieces for which he was directly responsible and the more commercial items that were produced to satisfy the demands of the market. The modern collector needs to be aware of this fact and appreciate that Tiffany glass varies in quality, and therefore price, for this reason.

Variants of Tiffany glass

Tiffany used several methods to produce iridescent glass by adding a film of metallic oxide, the particular oxide determining the colour. For example, iron oxide gave a green colour, and manganese oxide produced glass that was violet. A very popular lustre was gold, sometimes formed by spraying a gold oxide on to the glass while it was soft on emerging from the furnace.

Decoration was added to iridescent glass by various methods. One involved the reheating of a small ball of glass many times (up to 20) with new pieces of glass being added each time. As the piece grew, so did the decoration added at the early stages. This method produced the characteristic “peacock feather” vases that are now highly prized.

Another technique was to decorate a vase while still soft, by adding coloured glass in flower patterns and rolling the new glass in until smooth, then encasing the whole in further glass, thus giving the finished piece an impression of depth. This technique was used for Tiffany’s “paperweight vases”.

“Cypriote” ware was glass with a crusted surface, intended to reproduce the corroded texture of ancient glass. The technique involved rolling the warm glass over a surface that was covered with pulverised glass crumbs. Cypriote ware was usually made from brown or blue opaque glass, and the pieces tended to be larger than other vase types.

Tiffany also produced “lava glass” with irregular decoration in gold lustre, agate ware (different colours run together then polished) and marbilized ware (colours blended to resemble marble).

Of particular interest are Tiffany’s lampshades, in the form of glass mosaics within a leaded framework. A very large number of these were produced, such that it would seem that nobody who could afford a Tiffany table lamp would dare to be seen without at least one in their house, preferably several. The quality varies considerably, but the best lampshades are beautifully constructed and incorporate subtle uses of colour.

Many Tiffany pieces are marked with the word “favrile”, and are sometimes referred to “Tiffany-Favrile”. The word is derived from the Old English word “fabrile” and simply means “hand made”.

Tiffany’s reputation

Louis Tiffany had pretensions to be an American William Morris, but whereas Morris sought to simplify and to make art and good design affordable, Tiffany was more interested in the luxurious and exotic. By seeking to reproduce forms found in Nature and the distant past he could be said to have been in tune with the principles of Art Nouveau, but he did not subscribe to any Art Nouveau dogma. He did, however, make a huge contribution to American craftsmanship and produced many pieces that, although only moderately functional, were highly decorative (this is art glass after all, not tableware!) and often exquisitely beautiful.

Good collections of Tiffany glass can be seen at the Bethnal Green Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Chrysler Art Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, among others.

© John Welford

American colonial glass

Early attempts to introduce glassmaking to the American colonies were not successful, and it was not until the mid 18^th century that glasshouses of any note or longevity were established. The two that deserve most attention were founded by Casper Wistar in New Jersey and Henry William Stiegel in Pennsylvania.

Wistar glass

Casper Wistar was a German who moved in 1717 to Pennsylvania, where he established a factory to make brass buttons. He used the profits from this business to buy land in southern New Jersey where he built a glassworks, importing glassmakers from Germany and the Netherlands to run it.

The main output of the factory was window glass and glass bottles, but the workers also got into the habit of using “end of day” glass to make pieces of tableware, primarily for their own use and for local sale. These items were usually plain and utilitarian, but were sometimes decorated with finials in animal or bird shapes to represent styles that would have been familiar to the makers from what they had known back in Europe.

These pieces, with their strong Germanic influence, gave rise to what is known as “South Jersey Type” glass, the tradition of which later spread northwards to New York and New England.

Casper Wistar died in 1752 and the factory was continued by his son Richard until 1780, when, being unable to find a buyer for the business, he closed it down. One difficulty with identifying Wistar glass is that Richard acted as not only a manufacturer but also an importer, selling products that came from factories abroad, most notably England, as well as his own glassworks.

Stiegel glass

Henry William Stiegel was a German from Cologne (born in 1729) who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1750 and married the daughter of an ironmaster. He took over his father-in-law’s ironworks, at Shaefferstown, in 1758 and rebuilt it as “Elizabeth Furnace”, named after his wife. The profits from iron making were used to establish a glasshouse alongside the Furnace, and in 1765 he established a purpose-built factory at Manheim, near Lancaster PA. Here he made tableware as well as bottles and window glass. A third glasshouse, also at Manheim, was built and extended between 1768 and 1771.

Stiegel employed around 150 workers (mainly brought over from England and Germany) at the peak of production, making a variety of glass objects that constituted the earliest examples of fine tableware produced in America. The products included both plain and coloured glass, some with engraving and enamelling. The products were sold throughout New England and some found their way to the West Indies.

However, Stiegel was not able to continue the success and went bankrupt in 1774, spending some time in a debtors’ prison. He died in 1785.

The problem noted above with regard to Wistar glass, namely that of identifying pieces produced at the factory, is even worse when dealing with Stiegel glass. The output of the factories was closely controlled, such that the pieces show little individuality and followed patterns that were popular either with customers who had settled in Pennsylvania from Germany or those of English extraction further north. Many pieces sold in the colonies were imported from Europe and are virtually indistinguishable from locally made products.

Many Stiegel pieces were pattern-moulded to give the outer surface bumps and dimples, often in coloured glass. This technique was carried westward in later years to create what became known as the “Stiegel Tradition” long after Stiegel’s factories had closed down. Many such pieces were copied from patterns familiar from imported European styles.

One pattern that is unmistakably Stiegel’s is a daisy design in a diamond or hexagonal pattern, on glass pocket bottles, which is unknown as belonging to any European factory. These bottles were manufactured at Manheim between 1769 and 1774.

Stiegel also produced enamelled tumblers and mugs to a pattern well known in Germany. However, the fact that slogans were inscribed in English on glassware that was identical to contemporary wares made in Germany suggests that they were imported and then enamelled at the Stiegel factory. These would have found a ready market among the large population of German immigrants in Pennsylvania.

Collections of early American blown glass, and similar European wares, can be seen at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corning Museum of Glass (New York), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and elsewhere.  

© John Welford