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THE LAMPS OF TIFFANY:

Highlights from the Neustadt Collection

      Art Glass in      

America's Gilded Age

The art glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) and Frederick Carder (1863-1959) became popular in America during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  After the Civil War, America experienced unprecedented economic expansion and social mobility as the railroad, steel, iron, and textile industries grew rapidly.  For many Americans, this industrialization led to longer, more difficult work and an impoverished way of life.  However, a few fortunate entrepreneurs became tremendously wealthy.  In 1882, there were 4,047 millionaires in America, a tiny fraction of the adult population.  However, their celebration of wealth made such an enormous impact on American culture that the time period became known as the Gilded Age.

The wealthy built fabulous new mansions and decorated them lavishly.  Popular architects Richard Morris Hunt and Stanford White built copies of French chateaux and Florentine palazzi on “Millionaire’s Row,” a section of New York City’s Fifth Avenue.  Artists and their patrons alike visited foreign countries and developed a taste for the exotic that was eventually reflected in their home decoration.  An example of such décor can be found in Library at Arbour Hill (1878) by Walter Launt Palmer, in which wealthy financier Thomas Worth Olcott is shown in his home decorated with overlapping Oriental rugs and other ornate décor.[1]  The wealthy patronized the arts on an unprecedented scale; they  spent enormous amounts of money accumulating decorative arts[2] both for their own enjoyment and to display their elevated social status.  Some found their extravagance vulgar:  critics found the new mansions lacking in sophistication and authenticity, and French Prime Minister George Clemenceau remarked that the nation had moved from a stage of barbarism to one of decadence without achieving any civilization in between.  However, the Gilded Age is often regarded as a coming-of-age period in American art because the nation developed its own distinctive tastes.  While wealthy patrons created a unique material culture[3], many artists and others sought to share the beauty of everyday objects beyond this elite group.  Adherents of the Aesthetic Movement advanced the idea that a beautiful environment could actually enhance a person’s quality of life, and glassmakers like Tiffany and Carder were able to bring beautiful objects to a wider, though still privileged, audience.

Louis Comfort Tiffany’s own life exemplifies many aspects of the Gilded Age.  Benefiting from his father’s wealth, Tiffany traveled to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and his travels strongly influenced his art.   He later reflected,  “When I first had a chance to travel to the East and to paint where the people and buildings are clad in beautiful hues, the pre-eminence of color in the world was brought forcibly to my attention.  I returned to New York wondering why we made so little use of our eyes. . . .”[4]  Tiffany began his art career by training as a landscape painter, and he studied with second-generation Hudson River School painter George Inness, whose 1869 An Adirondack Pastoral  hangs in the Albany Institute’s galleries.  Later Tiffany turned away from the fine arts toward decorative arts, which aim to be not only beautiful, but also useful.  He began in the new field of interior design before specializing in producing glass.  Through his interior design, glass, and decorative objects that ranged from large and ornate to small and relatively inexpensive, Tiffany sought to bring beauty and color into people’s everyday life. 

With the rise of industrialization, consumerism increased: more people were purchasing manufactured objects to decorate their homes.  “The problem was that industrialists did not always put much thought into how a product might appear, quite often they just picked out parts from a pattern book. For example, a chair might have a French 18^th-century set of legs with a Chinese style seat.” [5]  Some artists and designers of the period bemoaned this trend, and advocated a return to high craftsmanship and training, truth to materials, and meaningful work environments for all workers.  William Morris and other members of the English Arts and Crafts Movement are a good example of this trend.[6]

In America, Louis Comfort Tiffany also championed the production of fine craftsmanship as a reaction against the effects of 19^th-century industrialism.  In his production of lamps, Tiffany sought to create a hand-crafted, artistic product that met his high standards for design and artistic excellence, but which might also be affordable to a larger group of people than his windows ever could be.   In the second half of the 19^th century, glass bottles and other types of vessels were mass-produced through processes like mold blowing.  Uniformity and clarity were prized goals of this industrial production.  Tiffany, on the other hand, recognized the innate beauty of irregular, unique glass forms, with impurities that could add to the beauty of the medium.  Such glass was the result of older techniques and handmade craftsmanship tracing back to antiquity.

Like proponents of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts Movement of the same period, “…Tiffany envisioned a workshop with himself as the master surrounded by many assistants.  His desire to use art to improve glass wares and to raise the standards of design for objects used in the home, mirrors the aspirations of William Morris.” [7]  Unlike Morris, a Socialist whose philosophy included seeing craftsmanship as a means to achieve a more equal and moral society, Tiffany was more interested in fulfilling his personal vision.  He was also quite interested in marketing his products successfully, despite the fact that the lamp production was never very profitable. The lamp production exemplifies both sides of Tiffany’s enterprise: through it he attempted to create a hand-crafted object of high quality and originality while simultaneously creating a product for a large customer base.

To achieve these ends, Tiffany mass-produced glass lamps and stained glass windows.  As consumerism grew stronger in America, it became fashionable to have a Tiffany lamp in one’s home.  In 1902, economist Thorstein Veblen labeled this behavior “Conspicuous Consumption”, writing, “If the articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific.”  Though Tiffany utilized an assembly line, his glass was still produced at a high cost, and was consequently sold at high prices.  For example, the highly popular wisteria lamp was offered for $350 in the original catalog.  In spite of Tiffany’s popularity, his ventures ran into debt year after year.  However, Tiffany was more concerned with producing beautiful glass using original techniques, and he was able to offset his losses with his family fortune.

Meanwhile, Frederick Carder was deeply concerned with profit, partly because he did not have the same financial security as Tiffany.  Carder, who was born in England, began working in his father’s pottery at age 14.  He gradually learned pottery and glassmaking through a variety of factory positions, and he came to the United States 1903, where he became a partner in the newly-formed Steuben Glassworks, which began to produce colored, engraved, and cut glass. Shortly afterwards, concerned that Steuben’s lampshades were not selling quickly enough, Carder decided to sell them to the retailers directly.  The next year, Carder hired traveling salesmen who, in their manners and dress, sympathized with the tastes of wealthy clients.  The most successful salesman was Charles Potter, who wore expensive tailored suits and possessed courtly manners.  During Potter’s time, Steuben glass was so popular that Potter’s ten percent commission averaged around $20,000 a year, and he became as rich as many of his clients.

To achieve maximum financial success, Carder began his glass designs based on styles that were already popular in America and Europe, then added his own touch or carried an old technique to perfection to complete the design.  This led to a sometimes bitter rivalry between Tiffany and Carder.  For example, Tiffany produced a type of iridescent glass which he called Favrile. Inspired, he said, by the shimmering wings of butterflies and the neck feathers of pigeons, Tiffany mixed together glass of various colors while hot to achieve the desired effect. Carder concocted his own iridescent glass, called Aurene glass, which was thought by many to resemble Tiffany’s Favrile.  This gold Aurene glass catered to the craze for iridescent glass that Tiffany had created.  Unlike Tiffany, Carder produced the Aurene lampshades only when a market survey indicated that the product sales would be lucrative.  Then, reacting to the success of gold Aurene glass, Carder introduced blue, red, and green Aurene glasses from 1905 to 1911. Carder’s success encroached on the art glass market, which was further threatened as  “carnival glass,” a cheap imitation Aurene and Favrile glass, became available. In 1913, Tiffany sued Steuben Glass Works, claiming that Carder’s Aurene glass was made in deliberate imitation of Tiffany’s patented Favrile glass, and that the two were nearly indistinguishable.  The bill of complaint alleged that Tiffany Furnaces, “at the expenditure of large sums of money… has produced a distinctive kind of original glass, having a peculiar gold iridescence.”[8]  It went on, “Steuben Glass Works … has employed a workman who was trained in the plaintiff’s employ and who learned while in the plaintiff’s employ the method of producing such ornamentation of glass; and was hired in order that the defendant might learn from such workman how plaintiff produced some of plaintiff’s glass.”[9]  Carder responded to these claims by noting that, although this workman had switched from Tiffany Furnaces to Steuben Glassworks, he did not know how to make Favrile glass.  Further, Carder pointed out, various forms of iridescent glass had been produced in Europe throughout the 19^th century.  Tiffany’s lawyers dropped the suit in March of 1914.

In the face of the First World War, the decorative arts began to seem superfluous and unimportant.  By the 1920s and 1930s, the flowery Art Nouveau[10] style that frequently adorned Tiffany lamps and Carder glass was seen as a symbol of extravagance, and the public began to favor functional modern designs.  By 1925, Tiffany found his business increasingly unprofitable and ceased production forever.  In the Depression of the 1930s, Steuben Glass Works also lost business.  On occasion, Carder grudgingly tried his hand at the popular contemporary designs, but in 1932 he was demoted from manager of Steuben Glass Works to the relatively trivial position of art director.  Signaling the end of an era, the new management smashed the stockroom of “Old Steuben” pieces, judging them to be old-fashioned and unmarketable.   

The Lamps of Tiffany

• Art Glass in America's Gilded Age

• Tiffany and Nature

• Working in Tiffany's Glassmaking Factory

• Glass in History and Culture

• The Science of Glass

• Glossary

• Activities

• Web Resources

• Bibliography