Incandescence
Becoming Tiffany: From Hudson Valley Painter to Gilded Age Tastemaker at the Lyndhurst Mansion
Becoming Tiffany: From Hudson Valley Painter to Gilded Age Tastemaker at the Lyndhurst Mansion
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
By his own measure, Louis Comfort Tiffany was a failure as a painter.though he was born into a family steeped in art and design—his father founded Tiffany’s— and though he studied with two celebrated American painters, Hudson River luminist Samuel Colman and innovative tonalist George Inness, Tiffany’s paintings never truly caught fire with the paying public.you can see something of Colman’s characteristic palette, favoring muted blues and grays, and something of Winslow Homer’s moody composition in Tiffany’s canvases. His principal subjects, laborers in fields and by the sea and scenes from ventures in the Holy Land— inspired by his travels and by the influence of French landscape painter Léon Adolphe-auguste Belly—echo contemporaries like Frederic Church and, again, Homer, but a cursory glance at his paintings indicates a restlessness born of a profound dissatisfaction with the forms of painting as they were taught and practiced post-civil War. What Tiffany wanted—what his paintings want, even now—is to convey light, light in all its veins and moods: dawn, twilight, dusk and every hour in between; light as it falls on sailcloth and sand, on water, trees and minarets, on folds of cloth and folds of skin.what Tiffany wants is for his paintings to be incandescent—lit from within.
Becoming Tiffany: From Hudson
Valley Painter to Gilded Age Tastemaker, at Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, New York, sheds new light on this crucial figure in American arts.as the promotional material states,“based on new research, the exhibition conjures little known and unexpected dimensions of Tiffany’s career.works in the exhibition reveal his radical exploration of racial inequality in the North, his work with the
Jewish community on synagogues in Albany and Buffalo when such intermingling was not common, his pictorial documentation of rampant industrialization along the Hudson River, his adoption of Orientalist subjects, as well as his close but often difficult relationships with women patrons, collaborators and designers. In particular, the exhibition re-establishes the reputation of Helen Gould, eldest daughter of railroad baron Jay Gould, as a significant Tiffany patron.” Since Lyndhurst was Jay Gould’s summer residence, this grand historic home could not offer a more suitable setting. In Europe and the Near East,tiffany had seen and marveled at Byzantine mosaics and Gothic stained glass.the light they reflected and the light that shone through them inspired the artist, and, on his return, he began to explore the possibilities of these mediums as vehicles for his inspiration.
At the time, prevailing fashion favored painted glass, but Tiffany sought transparency, translucence and faceted light, and developed techniques to infuse glass with color, agate-like swirls and jeweled dazzle.though
many churches boast of Tiffany windows, tiffany would push the subject matter suitable to stained glass far beyond the constrictions of the church, creating landscapes, seascapes and gardens in leaded glass, the abstractions of the shapes and colors of individual pieces coming together to create the scene, changing by the minute with the changes of the light. After 1875, despite the fact that he continued to paint, and, in some way, to think of himself as a painter, tiffany would channel his creativity into what we deem—in a way that diminishes them slightly, as if they are lesser arts—home furnishings, decor, design.
Tiffany would surround himself with artists, artisans and craftsmen—the same person would often wear all three hats. Candace Wheeler designed textiles. Lockwood de Forest designed furniture. Colman, tiffany’s old teacher, came on as a design specialist. tiffany himself would design stained-glass windows and the famous Tiffany lamps, blown glass objects, tile mosaics and ceramics, as well as metal objects ranging from jewelry to tableware.
Tiffany reigned, at last, over an empire of light.and in that empire, though Tiffany’s relationships with women may have been difficult, he at least seems to have had enough foresight to buck the to the patriarchal mores of the day, and hire the “Tiffany Girls,” including Clara Driscoll, whose recently rediscovered letters attest to their work assembling
stained glass and mosaics, and also to her own contributions, legendary Tiffany designs like the “daffodil” and “dragonfly” lamps, for example, among many others.
Tiffany’s interests coincided, fortunately, with the advent of the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements in Europe.these emphasized natural, curved forms—especially botanicals, birds, fish, skies and clouds—and advocated a philosophy of art purely for the sake of beauty as opposed to art as an instrument of social and political commentary.they also, intriguingly, coincide with the beginning of the mass production of the incandescent light bulb, patented by Edison in 1878.The ability to control light, to light the darkness, surely captivated Tiffany, and it wasn’t long before the kerosene in his lamps was supplanted by electrical current. You only have to compare the Tiffany tea screen, or the Mosaic of Cockatoos—or even the Enameled Vase—with any of the paintings, Port of Piraeus, View of Cairo or Pushing Off the Boat, Sea Bright, New Jersey to feel that what Tiffany wanted was to light those paintings from behind, to shoot light through the versos of the raw canvases so the scenes themselves would be shot through with light. It is almost surprising that he didn’t experiment with magic lanterns.
In the end,tiffany, who brought new illumination to ancient arts, may wellw, in dark moments, have thought of himself as a failed painter. From our vantage point, however, we can only say (to paraphrase Samuel Beckett) that Tiffany failed very well indeed.