Heat is required to melt and stabilize the materials (silica, stabilizer, and flux) into glass. It is solid once cool, or rather supercooled into frozen liquid. The greater the heat, the more liquid it becomes. As it cools it creates an elastic boundary or skin at the point where it meets the air. This allows weird procedures like shearing of a liquid or toughening when the interior mass is under compression and the skin in tension (for instance, dropping in water makes “tough drops” or “Prince Rupert drops”). There are countless methods of working. Inflation, to create a bubble, makes use of the fact that glass hardens as it cools but can be softened by reheating. This involves constant rotation by hand and body movements and is the basis of the ancient skill of glass blowing. In modern times skilled human movements are replaced by complicated machinery. Then there is static pressing, or squeezing between two metal surfaces, to impress patterns, shapes, dates, names, and other devices on blobs of hot glass; this technique is used with buttons and buckles, for instance. It involves the same methods as small-scale metalwork and was a cottage industry in Bohemia. Molds were developed for complicated objects. Sheet glass, following steel technology, is produced between rollers fed by a continuous stream of molten glass. Then there is spinning, the use of centrifugal force, which, at 3,000 revolutions a minute, pushes liquid glass upward into a mold, and is splendid for individual pieces designed by artists. In primary casting, the original material is pushed into the sand and then removed, leaving a designed void; hot glass is then poured into it direct from the furnace, using a ladle—this is obviously a good way of producing glass sculpture. The ladle can be replaced by an overhead casting machine, which melts the glass mixture and then pours it in a controlled stream. At this point we see an analogy with cooking, to join the analogies with iron founding and jewelry. The more mobile the mass of liquid glass is kept during its founding, the cleaner it becomes. So mobility is essential for clear glass (especially optical glass), and this entails continuous stirring, as in many cooking processes. The cleaner the glass, the stronger it is. Without continuous stirring, striation results, and that makes the glass ugly and fragile. Machines can be made to stir continuously in a way that is beyond the strength of a mere craftsman.3
All these are primary methods of glassmaking. Secondary methods, using reheated solid glass, do not need high temperatures, so no foundry is necessary and many forms of handworking are possible. These include lamp working, involving a small but intense heating source, and tremendous dexterity of hands and fingers, producing rods and tubes twisted into a vast variety of shapes. This kind of decorative glass, which goes back to Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, calls for simple technology but enormous skill and dexterity, and is still in use. For paperweights and similar pieces, there is cone forming—coating a pliable cone with homogeneous layers, then removing the cone and fusing. It was first developed in ancient Egypt and is still in use for high-quality objects, employing similar methods for forms of sweet making such as Blackpool rock. It looks magic, and is typical of the way in which artistic glassmaking is miraculously more than the sum of its parts. Bending, which exploits the intermediate stage between solid and liquid glass, is still used after 4,000 years. Secondary casting creates a much wider range of qualities than the primary kind. Pâte-de-verre, for instance, uses finely crushed glass grains and powders and is now applied for ceramic tiles in spacecraft. Another form of secondary casting is the cire perdu method, used from antiquity in casting bronze.4
It is vital to remember that glass is a solution, not a compound, and therefore a vast range of ingredients are possible. For instance, opaque white glass can be made by crystals, formed by putting in, say, fluorine; blue glass is made by adding cobalt or copper oxide; you add iron to produce green glass, or chromium, or a mixture of both; uranium oxide, tiny colloidal particles of silver or iron manganese, will produce varieties of yellow glass; cadmium sulphide is used for orange glass; various mixtures—cadmium sulphide plus selenium, antimony sulphide, or copper, gold, or lead—can be used for red glass.5
Over the last 200 years artists and manufacturers have acquired continuously growing knowledge of how different constituents of glass function, and what is the best way of securing this interaction and working the result. Control and predictability have replaced mystery and empirical rituals. Sometimes science is used to produce major improvements in technology. Thus in 1959 Pilkingtons discovered the flat process in which molten glass is floated on a bed of molten tin to produce polished, even sheets; this ended the traditional method of flat glassmaking. In the last fifty years and especially the last twenty-five, glass of enormous strength has increasingly been used as a building material, to create the amazingly light, ethereal appearance of new railway stations and airports.6
Tiffany came to glassmaking through jewelry. His father, Charles Lewis Tiffany, born in 1812, set up a shop in New York in 1837 selling stationery and fancy ware. He seems to have possessed extraordinary acumen in business, plus impeccable taste in choosing his merchandise, a form of creativity insufficiently acknowledged in the history of art, though the growth of studio-workshops in medieval Florence illustrates it perfectly. He had a strategy: to link the burgeoning wealth of the United States to the ancient fine arts and crafts of Europe. His progress from simple homemade stock to imported silverware from England and Germany; Swiss watches; jewelry from France; and glassware, porcelain, and bronze statuary from Italy is a classic example of entrepreneurial growth.7 He then reinvested his profits from selling luxurious imports into creating his own workshops and training and employing American craftsmen. He started making his own jewelry in 1848, and by the 1860s he was running the biggest business of its kind in America, with a busy branch in Paris. In 1851 he went into silverware and soon dominated the market. During the Civil War in the early 1860s his firm supplied the Union armies with swords, cap badges, buttons, and insignia. He used the enormous profits to expand his luxury business once peace returned, and a vast American plutocracy became his customers. In 1871, for example, his designer Edward Chandler Moore created “Audubon” flatware, silver services using bird motifs from the famous Elephant Folios of Birds of America, which Tiffany’s is still making and selling today nearly 140 years later.8 Tiffany was the first American silversmith to adopt the top sterling standard of 925 parts of 1,000 pure silver, and he made the most of the huge Nevada silver boom—so strikingly depicted by Mark Twain—to encourage rich Americans to go in for enormous silver presentation pieces. The William Cullen Bryant vase, for instance, is thirty-four inches high. Even more opulent was a gold vase presented to Edward Dean Adams, designed by the Tiffany artist Paulding Farnham, combining jewelry and silver-and goldsmithing. It is decorated with pearls, rock crystal, amethysts, tourmalines, and spesartites and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Tiffany used the new resources of Nevada, California, New Mexico, and Arizona, supplying silver, gold, and precious and semiprecious stones, in bewildering quantities to make all-American artifacts of the highest quality, which won first prizes at the top European exhibitions.9 He also took advantage of Europe’s political instability to buy up the jewels of royal and aristocratic families that had fallen from power. Thus in 1848 his agents bought up cheap jewel collections in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Italy; sold them at a princely profit to the new court of Napoléon III in Paris, especially to Empress Eugénie; then bought much of the spoils back again in 1870, when Napoléon III fell and he and his court had to run for it. Grand Europeans also bought Tiffany’s originals: by 1900, two years before he died, Tiffany was selling jewels and silver to twenty-three royal families (including Queen Victoria), as well as 100 millionaires of America’s “gilded age.”
Louis Comfort Tiffany, his son and heir, was primarily an artist rather than a businessman, studying painting first in the studio of George Inness, then in Paris under the orientalist landscape artist Léon Bailly.10 The younger Tiffany was also much impressed by the works of William Morris and his workshop, and by the way
artists and craftsmen worked together in the early stages of the arts and crafts movement. All his life Tiffany was an artist and a primary creator. But he was also, by nature, an organizer, a leader, and a businessman—a lavish spender and collector to be sure, but also a man who handled money circumspectly. He always paid his bills by return mail, a rare habit in his world; and he knew exactly how to create a viable business and cater to public taste, as well as improve it. He copied from Morris the idea of artists cooperating in firms. He first formed, in 1877–1878, the Society of American Artists (with John La Farge and Augustus Saint-Gaudens) to improve the quality of American painting and market it successfully. Then, in 1879, he set up, following Morris’s example, the interior decorating firm of Louis C. Tiffany and Associated Artists (the latter including Candice Wheeler, an embroiderer and textile designer). Interior design was the rage, thanks to Whistler, whose Peacock Room was a harbinger, and Oscar Wilde, whose notorious lecture tour of America carried the message of “living for art,” especially in the home. Tiffany’s firm carried out some notable schemes—in the Veterans’ Room in the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City; at Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut; and, not least, at the White House, which under Chester Arthur, president from 1881 to 1885, received its first large-scale makeover since it was built. Arthur got rid of twenty-six wagonloads of “old junk,” as he called it, and brought in Tiffany’s team.11
It is a matter of definition whether Tiffany was primarily an artist and creator himself or a “creator facilitator,” a man who made it possible by his vision and organizing ability for others to create and produce. He was certainly both: but which came first in his order of priorities? One might ask the same question of Verrocchio, a painter and sculptor of genius in his own right, who also ran the largest shop in Florence, training young men like Leonardo da Vinci, who became great masters in their turn. Creators like Pugin, Morris, and Tiffany—designers themselves but also businessmen competing in the open market and employing craftsmen, sometimes in large numbers, to undertake big projects—ran the modern equivalents of the Italian Renaissance studio. But though Tiffany had a great deal in common with Pugin and Morris, including an imperious nature which made it impossible for him to continue for long as part of a team, he also had the background of his father’s business, conducted on a large global scale, and emerging at a time when America was transforming itself from a largely farming economy into the world’s biggest industrial power. In 1883, while he was still redecorating the White House, he dissolved his art partnership, and thereafter he operated through a series of personal businesses: the Tiffany Glass Company of Brooklyn (1885) and Tiffany Studios of New York (1889), which was integrated with the original Tiffany and Company in 1902 when his father died and he inherited the firm. In 1892 Tiffany established the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in Corona, Long Island, to make art glass on a huge scale. His object, conscious or unconscious, was to unite the forms and methods of Morris and the arts and crafts movement with the new style which sprang from it, especially in Belgium and France. This embodied Tiffany’s own aesthetic ideology, that all art forms should evolve directly from the forms of nature, whether trees, flowers, rocks, birds, and animals or phenomena such as sunsets and moonlight. Although the style was English at birth, it was baptized l’art nouveau, after a shop opened by the entrepreneur Samuel Bing in Paris in December 1895. By then, as it happens, the style was already a decade and a half old, and Tiffany was right at the center of it. But Bing put his finger on the distinguishing mark of Tiffany as a “creator facilitator” when he wrote: “Tiffany saw only one means of effecting the perfect bridge between the various branches of industry: the establishment of a large factory, a vast central workshop that would consolidate under one roof an army of craftsmen representing every relevant technique…all working to give shape to the careful planned concepts of a group of directing artists, themselves united by a common current of ideas.”12
Tiffany was thus updating the Renaissance studio in an industrial age, but one that centerd around glass rather than on bronze, marble, and paint. He came to glass, however, through his work as a landscape artist, his first love. He wanted to infuse his landscapes with light, in a way never before achieved. In Paris he had watched artists try to do this using the techniques (derived from Turner) of what was soon called impressionism. He decided to do it by painting on, or increasingly with, glass. He was much impressed by the stained glass produced by William Morris and Morris’s chief designer, Edward Burne-Jones, which he rightly saw was infinitely superior to anything being produced in America, despite the enormous demand: in the 1870s about 4,000 churches were being built in the United States, each of which required colored glass. Tiffany first worked with John La Farge, who had similar ideas; but gradually they became rivals, then enemies.
Tiffany’s approach to colored window glass was based on two main ideas. First, he grew to dislike painted or stained glass and came to believe that the patterns and pictures must be composed of glass whose color was inherent and acquired in the foundry. By going into the chemistry of glassmaking he realized that virtually any color of glass could be produced; and by producing his own “palette” of glass, he could compose windows exactly as he wished, with all the intensity and purity of color of the best medieval glass. Second, he thought that colored glass should not be confined to churches but also used in the modern home. From the start, and using his new industrial methods of glass production, he made windows for large numbers of churches using the lead line to reproduce his draftsmanship and color choice and with virtually no painted detail (he also tended to ignore the pointed Gothic design of windows or other architectural features; this disregard would have infuriated Pugin).13 Tiffany continued to produce religious window glass. One of his masterworks was Tree in the Marsh (1905) for the Russell Sage Memorial Window in the First Presbyterian Church in Far Rockaway. Another was a vast landscape window (1924) in the Pilgrim Congregational Church in Duluth, Minnesota. This use of landscape glasswork in churches was at first regarded as sacrilegious by critics, but is now accepted as a distinctive and marvelous form of the art and features prominently in the Metropolitan Museum’s great Tiffany display.14 But Tiffany’s secular glass windows were naturally more adventurous, though he was not the only artist making them: there were also Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland, Victor Horta in Belgium, Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona, and Hector Guimard in Paris. But Tiffany was the only one who produced highly adventurous landscape designs from nature that he executed himself. As early as 1883 he produced an immense screen for Chester Arthur’s White House, dividing the dining room from the main corridor axis. In 1890 he exhibited, in Paris and London, his vast Four Seasons, four symbolic landscapes, perhaps his greatest work in colored window glass. He used opalescent and iridescent glass as well as transparent colored glass, and some of the effects he achieved were mesmerizing, though with one or two exceptions all his best windows have been destroyed. For designs he favored flowers and birds, especially peacocks (as Whistler also did). Tiffany’s great Peacock Window, now in a villa on Long Island, was designed for a New York house (1912), built in the Pompeiian style. When, today, his glass windows are shown in museums, like the Metropolitan, it has to be remembered that he designed them for specific rooms where their motifs and colors were integrated with other elements which Tiffany designed or supplied—carpets, curtains, furniture, and ornaments.15
As a by-product of his window work, Tiffany began to produce lamps, taking another turn in his effort to use intensified light in designs from nature. Here was another case of art and industry advancing together. John D. Rockefeller, by creating Standard Oil and achieving enormous economies of scale, had reduced the price of paraffin by over 90 percent, the greatest single boon ever bestowed on the housewife, making both stove heat and lamplight cheap, and leading to a vast increase in the number of lamps manufactured. This was quickly followed, in the closing decades of the century, by the introduction of e
lectric light in the home, replacing both paraffin and gas lighting with a source of light that was odorless and far less risky. Tiffany’s venture into luxury lamps, distinct from the mass-produced articles, thus highlighted a sensational technological change in the way homes were lit. Originally he designed lamps to use up bits of colored glass left over from his windows. Then, as the idea took off, lamps became a key part of his production and favorites with the public, who paid as much as $500 for one of the more complex lamps, with 1,000 separate pieces of glass in its shade. Tiffany also realized that glass lamps (and vases), if well designed and superbly crafted, were the best method of fulfilling his aim of bringing beauty into the home.
All his lamps were inspired by nature. The Wisteria lamp introduced the uneven edge of the shade, a Tiffany hallmark. The magnificent Zinnia was a virtuoso piece of clever metalwork. The Dragonfly had a twisted base in the shape of a water lily. The most spectacular lamp was the Pond Lily, which had twelve lights of iridescent glass sprouting from a base of metal. It vied as a favorite with the Apple Blossom, designed to “light up like an Orchard in Spring”; and the Magnolia, which produced the precise off-white shades of this fascinating tree. All the later lamps were designed to use electricity; Tiffany recognized that this new source of power could be used to produce spectacular light effects. He joined forces with Thomas Edison to design New York’s first all-electric theater. Tiffany had been mesmerized in Paris by the Folies Bergères, where the dancer Loie Fuller of Chicago had a spectacular season. She was the first to use a team of skilled electricians, and colored glass, to illuminate her gyrations with long veils mounted on arm sticks, producing effects that drew artists and sculptors from all over Europe to capture her poses. Among these artists was Toulouse-Lautrec. Tiffany, who greatly admired him, used him and other artists, such as Degas and Whistler, to design glass windows and screens for Samuel Bing’s shop in Paris. But as a rule Tiffany preferred his own designs or designs prepared under his immediate supervision. He wrote: “God has given us our talents not to copy the talent of others but rather to use our own brains and imagination.” Individualism, even when the artist was working in a team, was “the road to True Beauty.”16
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