Ruth Leon Recommends… Louis Comfort Tiffany In New London – Lyman Allen Art Museum

The jewellery giant, Tiffany & Co. was founded in 1837 by 25-year-old Charles Lewis Tiffany and his business partner John B. Young and is still flourishing today. But it is his son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, who is remembered for the stained glass lamps that were made in his design studio and became a crucial element of the Art Nouveau movement, and for his revolutionary approach to the art of stained glass.

The first Tiffany lamp was exhibited in 1893, and is assumed to have been made in that year. Its designer was not, as had been thought for over 100 years, Louis Comfort Tiffany himself but a previously unrecognized artist named Clara Driscoll, who was only identified in 2007 as being the master designer behind the most creative and valuable leaded-glass lamps produced by Tiffany Studios.

Tiffany lamp exhibitions are frequently held at art museums, featuring major collections like those at the Queens Museum, The Morse Museum, and The Met, focusing on craftsmanship, authenticity (spotting fakes), and key designers like Clara Driscoll, highlighting the innovation and artistry ofLouis Comfort Tiffany’s work.

This little film explores the life and career of artist, designer, and glassmaker Louis Comfort Tiffany from New London, Connecticut, focusing on his unique connections to the region. It comes from the Lyman Allen Art Museum.

But lamps weren’t all that was coming out of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s design studio. The stained glass windows that were once only made for churches began to be seen in private houses too. And one of the grandest of those windows is now in the Met.

Twenty years ago, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Curator of American Decorative Arts at The Met, saw photographs of a three-part Tiffany window depicting a lush garden landscape and immediately fell in love with it. It was in private hands until a few years ago when it became available and was enthusiastically brought into the Museum’s collection.

Conceived, commissioned, and crafted by women, the window highlights the important, and often unrecognized, role played by women in the art of Louis C. Tiffany.

It was designed by Agnes Northrop, one of Tiffany’s premier window designers and was commissioned by Sarah Cochran, a successful Pittsburgh businesswoman, philanthropist, and suffragist for Linden Hall, the large estate she built in Dawson, Pennsylvania, in 1912.

The careful selection of the ingenious glass and the cutting into often impossible shapes of literally thousands of pieces of glass was done by Tiffany’s skilled artisans, almost all of them women. In this new film, the window arrives at The Met where it is carefully studied by Frelinghuysen and Met conservator Drew Anderson before being installed in its new home in the Met Museum’s American Wing.

Louis Comfort Tiffany died 93 years ago this week on 17th  January 1933.

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