Although Tiffany understood glass technology thoroughly and was always introducing innovations at his works, he did not blow glass himself, or even cast it. In 1892 he brought from Stourbridge, England, the manager of the White House Glassworks, Arthur J. Nash, to create a new division, called Tiffany Furnaces, to produce a special new kind of multilayered glass, the chemistry of which Tiffany had already discovered. It was iridescent, with a nacreous surface, very luxurious to the touch, and produced by treating hot glass with a secret combination of oxides, which Tiffany registered in 1894, calling the project favrile (not after a French term but from an Old English word meaning made by hand). As was typical of Tiffany’s love of sensual effects, the touch of this new material was as important as its visual properties and its receptivity to rare colors. It could be used for all kinds of objects, and became a fin de siècle symbol of décadence, but it was best suited to the magnificent vases that Tiffany created in the 1890s. These included the Peacock Feather, in which favrile produced, as if by magic, a distinct shimmer; and the Double Gourd, which blended ideas from antiquity with art nouveau. Tiffany was fascinated by an American flower called jack-in-the-pulpit, in which the stamens appeared to be preaching from out of a delicate hole formed by the petals. He designed various vases based on this theme, using new technical devices, including a superb gold-colored-glass, velvety to the touch. The rare colors and textures had to be achieved while the glass was hot, so they required superb craftsmanship. Even more care was required for the Paperweight vases, using an ancient technique Tiffany improved and updated, in which flowers appeared to be trapped between outer and inner layers of glass.17
Tiffany was a true creator in that he was never content, was always experimenting, and delighted in setting himself and his assistants impossible tasks. By the turn of the twentieth century he was employing 100 of the world’s best glassworkers, paying them the highest wages, and encouraging them to produce any of their own ideas that he could research with his chemistry division, make using Nash’s experience, and market—he had an immense personal flair for marketing. He used the resources of his Tiffany jewelry workshops to produce special metal effects at his foundry, and these, combined with rare colored glass, led to “jewel vases,” which extended his range of vases based purely on nature. He was constantly studying ancient pieces of glass that he had picked up on his travels or had examined in museums, to find effects, originally produced by accident, which he could chemically analyze and produce artificially. This is how he and Nash hit on a superb new class he called Cypriote, opaque and delightfully pitted, found in its original form in diggings at Famagusta. He also developed a ravishingly rich glass with a rough surface that he called Lava, inspired by fragments he found near Vesuvius. His studies of antiquity led him to make delicate encaustic tiles that could be used in modern bathrooms, or in the surround for a new type of fireplace he designed (incorporating shelves for books or objets d’art), the first radical innovation since Count Romford produced a smokeless grate in Jane Austen’s day. Tiffany found that tiles buried for 2,000 years in ashes (as at Pompeii) underwent chemical changes, producing lusters which he could reproduce in his factory, and he was soon selling more tile sets than vases. He experimented with pottery, producing some amazing pieces, especially vases such as the Fern Frond, in yellow, with seven scrolled openwork stems joined at the top, or pots modeled on cabbages, corn stumps, pussy willows, artichokes, and other common plants and vegetables. His clay was thrown on a wheel or sculptured from lumps, molded in plaster for duplicates, hand-finished, and fired in a coal-burning kiln. The colors—ivory, beige, ochre, and rare browns and greens—were sumptuous, and each object was produced only ten times. His metal objects, especially vases, became more adventurous, especially after 1898, when he used special metal furnaces and recruited an enamels department. In 1902 he made a startling enamel-on-copper vase, with repoussé work of orange branches and green foliage. It gave an effect of opacity in reverse: rays of light, passing through translucent layers of enamel on the vase, rebounded off a layer of mirror foil with great iridescence and brilliance, an effect achieved by spangles and small sheets of thin gold or silver embedded in the transparent enamel. It would be hard to decide which was more remarkable: Tiffany’s conception, entirely original, or the skill of the three enamelers who carried it out.
Tiffany’s best times were the 1880s and 1890s, the opening years of the twentieth century, and the height of the art nouveau period. Then came a series of blows. His father died in 1902, leaving him all the responsibility for the vast jewelry business; and his friend and partner Samuel Bing, in Paris, retired the same year. In 1904, Tiffany’s great rival Émile Gallé died, and Tiffany missed him. He had already experienced a brutal attack on his art. In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became president, as a result of McKinley’s assassination, and moved into the White House. Roosevelt, like Tiffany, had an estate on Long Island at Oyster Bay, and was a sworn enemy as well as a jealous neighbor. He saw Tiffany as an immoral bohemian, who had brought to New York the adulterous habits of the Parisian Latin Quarter. “That man,” he roared to anyone who would listen, “lays his hands on other men’s wives.” (There was some truth in this.) Chester Arthur had said he found the White House “like a secondhand junk shop”—hence the expensive remake by Tiffany. But Roosevelt declared that the changes “made it look like a whorehouse.” He refused Tiffany’s offer to buy back all the objects, including the great screen that had been installed. Regarding the screen, he commanded his workmen: “Break that thing into small pieces.” Everything Tiffany had put into the White House was destroyed.18
There were other developments that also made Tiffany uneasy. He loathed the fauves. He hated the cubists still more. He was deeply upset in 1913, when the Armory Show introduced modern art from Paris to America, especially as half a million people went to see it. Tiffany responded by using his wealth to embellish his houses and entertain lavishly. At his home on Seventy-second Street, the principal theme was ancient Egypt, with decor by Joseph Lindon Smith. Delmonico did the catering for Tiffany’s dinner parties, at which Tiffany often wore Turkish clothes and donned a turban. To compensate for the pain caused him by the Armory Show, he staged a masque at his Madison Avenue showroom. On the stage were some of his most magnificent favrile vases, beautifully spotlighted. The New York Philharmonic Orchestra played, and one of his girlfriends, the dancer Ruth St. Denis, wearing a microskirt, did an Indian hatchet dance to music specially written by Thomas Steinway. The New York Times called it “The most lavish costume fête ever seen in New York.”
In Oyster Bay, Tiffany took over an estate of 580 acres, with a long shoreline facing Cold Spring Harbor, demolished an old hotel there, and built Laurelton Hall, a vast steel-frame mansion, probably the most elaborate house ever conceived in America. A stream ran through its central court, feeding an immense bronze fountain in the shape of a Japanese dragon. Water bubbled through a vast Greek amphora that changed color electrically and gave the effect of sunlight on a lake. There was a campanile, and the entrance lay between granite columns flanked by ceramic mosaics, using many of his finest iridescent blue tiles. The house rose above a yacht basin—like many other millionaires in the gilded age, Tiffany commuted to his New York office by steam yacht—and contained eighty-four rooms and twenty bathrooms. The roofing was of copper, and the building as a whole, conforming to his art nouveau principles, had the appearance of a magic mushroom. Gaudi, the outstanding architect of the age, had a hand in it, though Tiffany himself was the master designer. There were “dark rooms,” lit mainly by electricity; and “light rooms,” where sunlight was the chief source of illumination. The living room (dark) contained his five masterpieces in colored glass—Four Seasons, cut into separate panels; Feeding the Flamingos, which had won the prize at the 1894 Chicago World Fair; Flowers, Fish, and Fruit (1885); Eggplants (1880); and The Bathers, specially designed for the house. There was a room for his collection of Native American artifacts, as well as a Ch
inese Room, various tearooms, a music room, and an elaborate conservatory with palm trees.
This was by far the most publicized house in America, but it was not a happy home. Tiffany squabbled with other neighbors besides Theodore Roosevelt. His second wife, much loved, died in 1908. His three daughters—Julia, Comfort, and Dorothy—grew up and left home; all were gone by 1914. Tiffany was lonely and entertained frantically, with one mistress after another as his resident hostess. In 1911 he invited 150 “gentlemen intellectuals,” as he called them, to Laurelton Hall “to inspect the Spring Flowers,” and consume a “feast of peacocks” served by floozies dressed as ancient Greek maidens, with real peacocks perched on their shoulders. An orchestra played Bach and Beethoven.19
By this point, Tiffany could feel public taste slipping away from him, as the jazz age and the society described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby took over. In 1916 Tiffany published—through Doubleday, but not for sale—a sumptuous volume, printed on parchment, called The Artwork of Louis C. Tiffany. Just 502 copies were made, 300 of them given to friends. The text consisted of a series of interviews with Tiffany, conducted by Charles de Kay. (The book is now very scarce and a prime collector’s piece.) The same year he gave a new masque at Laurelton, “The Quest for Beauty,” which used a revolutionary system of dome lighting. The forty-five-member cast included “Beauty” herself, who emerged from an iridescent bubble of blown glass, a minor miracle of new technology. The cost was $15,000. All was to no avail. Tiffany could still get important commissions overseas—in 1925 he decorated the presidential palace in Havana, with twenty-three of his special rugs and fifteen lamps. Also in 1925, Robert de Forest, the farsighted director of the Metropolitan Museum, bought Tiffany’s tremendous landscape window, now the center of a vast display. But by then Tiffany’s art was decidedly out of fashion, and yearly becoming more so, as art deco ousted the last vestiges of art nouveau. He shut down his favrile production center in the early 1920s and sold off the stock. Other bits of his empire were disposed of. He had a redhaired Irish girl, Sarah Hamley, to look after him, as a nurse and mistress—he remained sexually active to the end—but died on 17 January 1933, at age eighty-four.
There followed one of the most ruthless artistic massacres in history. By the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression, about the last thing Americans wanted was art nouveau, even its finest flowering, Tiffany ware. In 1938 the house on Seventy-second Street was dismantled and razed to the ground. Its contents fetched virtually nothing. The same year 1,000 precious items of Tiffany stock, including twenty large colored-glass windows, were sold off at low prices. Unsold items were thrown away. In his old age, Tiffany had tried to turn Laurelton Hall into a home for artists, but the scheme did not flourish. In 1946 its wonderful contents were auctioned for tiny sums; one large, signed favrile vase fetched only $20. The house and its surrounding acres, once valued at $20 million, were sold for $10,000, and the house itself burned down.
Fashion is a flirtatious mistress and a savage master. It is impossible now to convey the contempt, amounting to hatred, with which art nouveau was regarded during and just after World War II. By then much of this art had been deliberately destroyed. One important collection, however, emerged unscathed. In the 1880s, Joseph Briggs, a lad from Accrington in Lancashire, went to America to better himself. After working on the railroads, he got employment with Tiffany at the Long Island works. He rose through the ranks to become general manager, and each time he was involved in a new product he kept a copy of it. After Tiffany’s death, Briggs retired and returned to Accrington, bringing his collection with him, and when he himself died he bequeathed it all to the local museum. It consists of 120 pieces, including sixty-seven vases and forty-five tiles, and many of these items are unique. The museum was urged, just after the war, to “get rid of the rubbish,” but refused. As late as the 1950s the entire collection was valued at only £1,200. But at about that time, collectors started to look again at art nouveau, and auction prices rose. The museum was again advised to sell “and buy something decent” but again refused. It now has the third largest collection of Tiffany in the world, after the splendid holdings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Gallery in Winter Park, Florida, which has over 4,000 pieces as well as Tiffany’s Byzantine ceramic chapel, originally created for a New York Episcopal cathedral.
The Tiffany revival began with Robert Koch’s book Louis C. Tiffany: Rebel in Glass (1964) and continued with Mario Amaya’s Tiffany Glass (1967). At the same time auction prices of Tiffany vases and, still more, lamps began to skyrocket. The immense destruction carried out from 1935 to 1955 made for rarity and high prices. By the early twenty-first century good pieces were fetching over $1 million each.20 More important was the regard now felt for objects involving brilliant design and invention and superb craftsmanship, noble to look at, exciting to touch, and, when illuminated, singular tributes to the first age of electricity. Tiffany lived at a time when American art and craftsmanship first came of age and took their place with the other great creative civilizations of Europe and Asia. After splendid but meretricious fame in his youth and neglect and contempt in his old age, followed by near-oblivion, Tiffany stands in the top rank of transatlantic craftsmen, a creative artist alongside Benvenuto Cellini, Grinling Gibbons, Thomas Chippendale, and Paul de Lamerie.
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T. S. Eliot: The Last Poet to Wear Spats
THE CASE OF T. S. ELIOT (1888–1965), the Anglo-American magus, who launched modern poetry in the English-speaking world in 1922 with the publication of The Waste Land, is a strange one, perhaps unique in world literature. As a rule, the great creative innovators in the arts, those who effect revolutionary changes in the way we see, feel, and express ourselves, are also radical human personalities, at any rate at the time when they overthrow the existing creative order. Thus Wordsworth and Coleridge, the creators of romantic poetry, who achieved a similar revolution with their publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, were then doctrinaire utopians, who had applauded the extinction of legitimacy in France; Coleridge planned to establish an egalitarian community in America. T. S. Eliot, however, both at the time he wrote The Waste Land and before it—and after it, and throughout his life—was a conservative, a traditionalist, a legitimist, and, in many respects, a reactionary. He came from a deeply conventional, sober, stable background; received a long, thorough, exhaustive education of a kind calculated to reinforce these factors; and, most important, was of a temperament that venerated the riches of the past and regarded their disturbance with abhorrence. His very appearance reflected this orthodox inner man, who declared himself “a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Whereas Byron, Keats, and Shelley, all poetical innovators in their day, abhorred starched, buttoned-up collars and favored loose, unrestrictive garments, Eliot was never once (except on holiday) photographed without a tie, wore three-piece suits on all occasions, kept his hair trimmed, and was the last intellectual on either side of the Atlantic to wear spats. Yet there can be absolutely no doubt that he deliberately marshaled his immense creative powers to shatter the existing mold of poetical form and context, and to create a new orthodoxy born of chaos, incoherence, and dissonance.
There is nothing in Eliot’s background except inhibition, repression of emotions, and strong cultural continuity. He was born in St. Louis, where his father became a successful brick manufacturer, but his family origins were Boston Brahmin. One forebear had been part of the initial Massachusetts settlement of 1620—Puritan, strict, and individualistic. Another had been a Salem witch-hunter. But the family members were not, by the nineteenth century, Calvinists. They were Unitarians, living on that last staging post which links Christianity to outright disbelief in God. They denied the divinity of Jesus but recognized his virtue, seeing him as a superior Emerson. They were extremely careful, in discussing their religious beliefs, to use words meticulously and sparingly, preferring ambiguity to assertion. Later, Eliot himself wrote
an ironic poem holding up to ridicule the temperament and habits he inherited from this Unitarian past:
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But….
Eliot was brought up in a family enjoying affluence but without ostentation of any kind, and to privilege mitigated by strong concepts of duty and service, to God, country, community, and culture. His inheritance was virtue, probity, and righteousness. It was softened, however, by circumstance. He was by far the youngest of a large family, the delightful afterthought child of an adoring mother who wrote poetry and cultivated the best taste; and he was attended by an angelic quartet of sisters, much older than he was, so that in effect he had five careful mothers. They did not spoil but concentrated on him, ensuring that he was taught to be good, conscientious, hardworking, well-mannered, civilized, and pure. Having learned to read early under their careful tuition, he absorbed books voraciously all his life, reading richly and thoughtfully, rereading and analyzing, storing lines and passages of poetry—and prose too—in his heart, so that the habit of quotation and reference became second nature and habitual.1
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