Artist 7/20: Louis Comfort Tiffany

As I may have mentioned before, my favorite period in art history is from about 1840 - 1920. This is when we saw the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the Impressionistic movement as well as the short lived Art Nouveau. While Alphonse Mucha is among the people who exemplified the painting of this period, the most well-known sclupt/3d artist of this time was Louis Comfot Tiffany.

Tiffany is a good example of the kind of artists we all HATE! Born in 1848, he was talented, and truly cutting-edge for his time....but he was RICH! Oh yes, he never had to worry about funds or making connections. His father was Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany & Co. ....as in Tiffany Jewelry. So Louis was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth and constantly in the company of America's elite society. Because of his family name, Louis quickly gained recognition and two of his earliest projects include the designing of Mark Twain's home in Hartford, Connecticut as well as parts of the White House in 1882.

Although he was a talented painter, Louis soon became interested in the use of glass like cheep jelly jars and wine bottles. He is a prime example of taking found material and making art out of it. He particularly was fascinated about the qualities of impure glass. Glass with bubbles, streaks or unmixed colours were his favorite but he was unable to convince various glass companies to produce planes of glass with these features in mass quantity. And so in 1885, Louis launched his own glass company to do just that.

Since then his family name has become synonymous with the style of using stained glass in lamps, windows, mosaics, interior design and pottery. His use of textures and colors were unheard of at the time, replacing the tradition of painting on glass, a method that had been used in stained glass for over 700 years. His characters and landscapes capture and exemplify the style of the Art Nouveau period and has remained prevalent and classy by even modern standards. A prime example of a timeless style.