Type of art glass invented by Louis Comfort Tiffany
Favrile glass specimens from 1896 to 1902
Favrile glass is a type of iridescentart glass developed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. He patented this process in 1894 and first produced the glass for manufacture in 1896 in Queens, New York. It differs from most iridescent glasses because the color is ingrained in the glass itself, as well as having distinctive coloring. Tiffany won a grand prize at the 1900 Paris Exposition for his Favrile glass.
Tiffany founded his first glassmaking firm in 1892,[1] which he called the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company.[2] The factory, Tiffany Furnaces, was located in Corona, Queens, New York.[3] It was managed by English immigrant Arthur J. Nash, who was skilled in glassmaking. It was here that Tiffany developed his unique method of glassmaking: treating molten glass with metallic oxides that were absorbed into the glass and created a luxurious iridescent surface effect.
Tiffany worked to develop this new glass after being strongly influenced by his 1865 trip to Europe. In London he visited the South Kensington Museum, later renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose extensive collection of Roman and Syrian glass made a deep impression on him. These included iridescent glass. He also admired the coloration of medieval glass and believed that he could improve on the quality of contemporary glass.
After much experimentation and development, he received the patent for Favrile glass in 1894.[4] He made the first Favrile objects in 1896.[5] At the 1900 Paris Exposition, Tiffany's Favrile glass won the grand prize in the exposition.[6]
Favrile is different from other iridescent glasses because its color is not just on the surface, but part of the glass.[7] The original trade name, Fabrile, was derived from an Old English word, fabrile, meaning "hand-wrought" or handcrafted.[8] Tiffany later changed the word to Favrile, "since this sounded better".[9]
Some of the distinguishing colors in Favrile glass include "Gold Lustre," "Samian Red," "Mazarin Blue," "Tel-el-amarna" (or Turquoise Blue), and "Aquamarine".[10]
Uses
Favrile was the first art glass to be used in stained-glass windows. Tiffany planned to make patterns in windows based on the shapes and color of his glass.[5] Favrile glass also backs a large ornamental clock in Detroit's Guardian Building.[11] The largest and most significant glass-mosaic produced with Favrile glass is likely the Dream Garden (1916), commissioned for the Curtis Publishing Company's headquarters in Philadelphia. Artist Maxfield Parrish designed the work, and Tiffany Studios executed and installed it. The work is now owned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.[12]
Glass is a non-crystalline solid that is often transparent, brittle and chemically inert. It has widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optics.
Art Nouveau is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. Other characteristics of Art Nouveau were a sense of dynamism and movement, often given by asymmetry or whiplash lines, and the use of modern materials, particularly iron, glass, ceramics and later concrete, to create unusual forms and larger open spaces. It was popular between 1890 and 1910 during the Belle Époque period, and was a reaction against the academicism, eclecticism and historicism of 19th century architecture and decorative art.
Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. He 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, jewellery, enamels, and metalwork. He was the first design director at his family company, Tiffany & Co., founded by his father Charles Lewis Tiffany.
Maxfield Parrish was an American painter and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th century. He is known for his distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery. His career spanned fifty years and was wildly successful: the National Museum of American Illustration deemed his painting Daybreak (1922) to be the most successful art print of the 20th century.
John La Farge was an American artist whose career spanned illustration, murals, interior design, painting, and popular books on his Asian travels and other art-related topics. La Farge made stained glass windows, mainly for churches on the American east coast, beginning with a large commission for Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston in 1878, and continuing for thirty years. La Farge designed stained glass as an artist, as a specialist in color, and as a technical innovator, holding a patent granted in 1880 for superimposing panes of glass. That patent would be key in his dispute with contemporary and rival Louis Comfort Tiffany.
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A Tiffany lamp is a type of lamp with a camed glass shade designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany or colleagues, and made in his design studio. The glass in the lampshades is put together with the copper-foil technique instead of leaded, the classic technique for stained-glass windows. Tiffany lamps are considered part of the Art Nouveau movement. Considerable numbers of designs were produced from 1893 onwards.
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Tiffany glass refers to the many and varied types of glass developed and produced from 1878 to 1933 at the Tiffany Studios in New York City, by Louis Comfort Tiffany and a team of other designers, including Clara Driscoll, Agnes F. Northrop, and Frederick Wilson.
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Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová were Czech contemporary artists. Their works are included in many major modern art collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
The Kokomo Opalescent Glass Works of Kokomo, Indiana, is the oldest manufacturer of hand cast, rolled cathedral and opalescent glass in America, and the oldest manufacturer of opalescent glass in the world. In continuous operation since 1888, it was founded by Charles Edward Henry, who was relocating his existing stained glass manufacturing business from New Rochelle, New York. KOG has long been an important supplier to the American stained glass industry, including documented sales to Louis Comfort Tiffany, and in 1889, KOG won a gold medal at the Paris World Exposition for their multi-colored window glass.
Charles Jay Connick (1875–1945) was a prominent American painter, muralist, and designer best known for his work in stained glass in the Gothic Revival style. Born in Springboro, Pennsylvania, Connick eventually settled in the Boston area where he opened his studio in 1913. Connick's work is contained in many preeminent churches and chapels, including examples in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. He also authored the book Adventures in Light and Color in 1937. Connick's studio continued to operate, and remained a leading producer of stained glass, until 1986.
Martin P. Eidelberg is an American professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University and an expert on ceramics and Tiffany glass. He is noted for discovering that many floral Tiffany lamp designs were not personally made by Louis Comfort Tiffany, but by an underpaid and unrecognized woman designer named Clara Driscoll.
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Art Nouveau glass is fine glass in the Art Nouveau style. Typically the forms are undulating, sinuous and colorful art, usually inspired by natural forms. Pieces are generally larger than drinking glasses, and decorative rather than practical, other than for use as vases and lighting fittings; there is little tableware. Prominently makers, from the 1890s onwards, are in France René Lalique, Emile Gallé and the Daum brothers, the American Louis Comfort Tiffany, Christopher Dresser in Scotland and England, and Friedrich Zitzman, Karl Koepping and Max Ritter von Spaun in Germany. Art Nouveau glass included decorative objects, vases, lamps, and stained glass windows. It was usually made by hand, and was usually colored with metal oxides while in a molten state in a furnace.
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