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Gilding the Gilded Age

In his Corona factory, Tiffany spins colorful confections in glass

By Michele Ingrassia | Staff Writer

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It seemed to be the arrogance of youth: As a teenage artist studying in Europe in the 1860s, Louis Comfort Tiffany was drawn to the medieval windows of Chartres Cathedral, haunted by their jewel-like colors and boldly wrought designs. But for the brash young New Yorker, their beauty wasn't enough. ``He wanted,'' says William Valerio, curator of the Queens Museum of Art, ``to make glass that was even more beautiful than the great cathedrals of France.''

Tiffany's legacy is that he surpassed even his own braggadocio. From 1893, when the chapel he created for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago earned him international acclaim, until the late 1920s, when the looming Great Depression reduced him -- at least temporarily -- to a symbol of the despised Gilded Age, Tiffany reigned as the foremost artist of the art nouveau and arts and crafts movements. From his factory in Corona, he produced thousands of windows, lamps and vases, pieces that transformed glass from utilitarian object to work of art, as dazzling as any of the gems at Tiffany & Co., his father's famous jewelry store.

``He loved art and believed people would have a better quality of life if they surrounded themselves with good quality objects,'' says David Donaldson, an antiques dealer. ``What made him different was his creative approach. He decided that glass was something that could be explored, that he could paint with glass, not on glass.''

Ironically, Tiffany yearned to be a painter. In 1867, he planted himself in the studio of American landscape artist George Innes. A year later, he set off for Paris to observe painter Leon Bailly. He toured Morocco and Egypt, taking in the rich patterns and supersaturated colors that would eventually echo in his glass and interior designs.

But it was the windows of Chartres and the mosaics of Ravenna, Italy, that beckoned Tiffany to abandon landscapes. In an era when most window artisans painted designs on colored glass, Tiffany began experimenting in the early 1870s, hoping to duplicate the iridescence of ancient glass. It was Tiffany who, in 1881, registered a patent for the opalescent windows he created by adding metal oxides, rather than pigments, to the molecular structure.

What distinguished Tiffany's Favrile, or handmade, glass wasn't just color -- he produced 5,000 hues -- but its ever-changing forms. Tiffany Studios, opened in 1893, developed scores of new patterns -- drapery glass, mottled glass, confetti glass, jeweled glass among them. In audacious combinations, Tiffany could create designs never before dared, be it a dragonfly with ruby red cabachon eyes or fields of pansies more brilliant than nature's own.

Not surprisingly, he proved to be an unrelenting taskmaster to the workers who took delicate paper designs and cut them in glass, rimmed them with copper and soldered them into three-dimensional reality.

``He had a walking stick, and he'd walk through the factory,'' says Nancylee Dikeman, whose father-in-law, John, was foreman of the lamp department, and whose husband, Fred, became one of the country's foremost restorers. ``He'd tap a lamp with his stick and say, `This one is nice. This one is nice.' Then he'd take the cane and just wipe the others onto the floor.''

Worse, he could be a snob. Although he dreamed of a Tiffany in every house and he saw his colorful lamps as the antidote to the cold, bare lightbulb, his pieces were actually grand adornments for even grander houses. The Rockefellers were his customers; so were the Astors and the Rothschilds. Dikeman recalls their visits to the Manhattan showroom, ``where they could sit and have tea or coffee and choose which base they wanted with which shade.''

In 1881, when Mark Twain became popular and prosperous enough to buy a mansion in Hartford, Conn., he hired Tiffany's design firm to craft everything from windows to woodwork. A year later, President Chester Arthur paid him $15,000 to renovate the White House.

Of all Tiffany's designs, perhaps none was grander than Laurelton Hall, the 85-room mansion that he built for himself in 1905 on 850 acres overlooking Cold Spring Harbor. From the outside, it evoked the mystery of the Orient; inside it exploded with color, from the blue glass dome of the three-story hall to the fountain vase that changed hues depending on the time of day.

But like the house, destroyed by fire in 1957, Tiffany's glory seemed far more brittle than his glass. By the time he died at age 85 in 1932, the Depression had tarnished the Gilded Age, art deco had supplanted art nouveau, and Tiffany was, Donaldson says, ``a joke.'' The business finally fell into bankruptcy.

``It wasn't until the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York did a big Tiffany exhibition in 1958 that Tiffany was rediscovered,'' says Donaldson. ``The show took the town by storm.''

In the 40 years since, the challenge has not only been how to find a genuine Tiffany -- lamps can sell for tens of thousands of dollars, windows for millions -- but how to duplicate one. No one has perfected the depth of Tiffany's color and kaleidoscopic effect of his glass, but each year the copies improve.

``The way people are replicating them, the Tiffany lamp may well be like the '32 Ford,'' says Donaldson. ``There are more '32 Fords on the road today than were ever made in Michigan, thanks to fiberglass kits. One day, it may be the same with Tiffany.''