Tiffany and Nature

Louis Comfort Tiffany sought inspiration in nature for almost all of his artistic endeavors. He believed that nature is always beautiful, and nature is always right. As a young man, he began his art career with the study of landscape painting, and he was influenced by George Inness, a second-generation Hudson River School painter among others.[1] As he turned toward decorative arts, he was also influenced by the organic motifs of the Art Nouveau movement. Natural motifs appear repeatedly in his jewelry and metalwork designs. Tiffany’s stained glass, too, was a celebration of the beauty of nature.

Tiffany and other Art Nouveau artists found inspiration in nature for a variety of reasons. In the United States, Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species was becoming less expensive and more widely available, and many viewed nature as a “model for transformation and metamorphosis.”[2] This publication, along with advances in the scientific study of nature, caused artists and thinkers at the turn of the century to view nature as particularly dynamic and dramatic, and it informed their views about themselves and the world around them. Travel was also influential for Tiffany and other artists, and in the late nineteenth century, Japanese ceramics and lacquerware featuring images of plants and insects were particularly popular.[3] Art Nouveau was also a response to industrialization. While some artists sought nature as a relief from the factory and machine age, Tiffany viewed advances in technology as opportunities for reaching new aesthetic heights.

Tiffany believed that the medium of glass was peculiarly capable of replicating nature. He saw a long tradition of incorporating natural elements in the best stained glass: “The thirteenth-century stained-glass makers were great because they saw and reproduced beauty from the skies and stars. . . . they translated the beauty into the speech of stained glass.”[4] He strongly believed that the most beautiful and successful glass was created through the mixing of materials while the glass was in the molten state,[5] rather than etching or painting glass surfaces. Using the substance of the glass itself, Tiffany argued, the “. . . possibilities. . . for duplicating the most precious creations of nature are almost uncanny. . . .”[6] A single piece of glass could replicate a precious gem or the iridescent tones of a bird’s feathers.

Bringing together a vast array of glass pieces, Tiffany created beautiful lamps composed of a variety of natural motifs. These motifs include many things that Tiffany could see around his own garden, such as grapes, dragonflies, apple blossoms, peonies, wisteria, and spider webs. In fact, Samuel Howe, a colleague of Tiffany’s, described Tiffany’s avid interest in his gardens for his artistic purposes: Tiffany, Howe said, “has given himself up to the peculiar study of transmitting beauties of nature to elements of decoration. . . . The garden his school, the flower his companion, his friend and inspirer.”[7] The garden was not Tiffany’s only “school”, however. He possessed a large library of scientific books about various plants and animals. He was also an enthusiastic photographer, and magnolia branches and even a stuffed peacock were some of the subjects of the photograph collection in his studio.[8]

Tiffany’s lamps with their natural motifs are such singular creations in celebration of nature that remain popular and continue both to be widely sought-after and imitated today. However, natural motifs are celebrated in a variety of art forms by artists all over the world, as evidenced by the Albany Institue of History & Art’s own collection. Throughout the galleries you will find landscape paintings by 19^th century American artists, statues of animals and paintings of lotuses growing in the Nile by Ancient Egyptians, Chinese porcelains featuring flowers and Dutch home furnishings animals. Humans are constantly inspired by the nature all around them: Tiffany used to say that “Nature is God’s art.”

[1] See An Adirondack Pastoral by George Inness in the Albany Institute of History & Art’s third floor galleries.

[2] National Gallery of Art, http://www.nga.gov/education/tchan_3.htm

[3] National Gallery of Art, http://www.nga.gov/education/tchan_3.htm

[4] Koch, 150.

[5] For more information on how Tiffany created different artistic effects, see The Science of Glass and the Glass Glossary.

[6] Koch, 150.

[7] Eidelberg, 86.

[8] Eidelberg, 83-84.