Skip to main content

The Tiffany Screen

March 2023
3min read


Walls of rubies, diamonds, and emeralds, stupendous gemstones used as everyday objects, the rich gleam of reflected light: that is stuff dreams are made of. But when, instead of the Thousand and One Nights, the scene is turn-of-the-century New York, when those glowing jewels are made into vases, lamps, windows, and screens, then the magician responsible for it all, far from being a jar-bound spirit, can be none other than Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Of all the great American designers, none have been more imitated than Tiffany. And it is no wonder: the inventiveness of his creations and the sumptuousness of his colors and textures are both endlessly satisfying and deeply original. Within the great stream of the Art Nouveau movement, Tiffany has just as important a place as Gallé, Mackintosh, or the artists of the Wiener Werkstätte.

The splendid screen opposite is a good case in point. Large enough to be a major component in any room—it is seventy-one inches high and eighty-nine inches wide—it has all the rich, translucent color for which Tiffany is famous, while its theme of vines and flowers bathed in a golden light is typical of Art Nouveau’s most frequent motif. Influenced in part by the rococo, in part by the Byzantine revival of the 1880s, and in part by Japan, Art Nouveau looked to the world of vegetation for its twisting, turning stems and to certain flowers (water lilies, orchids, wisteria) for the intense but complex colors and the odd, hanging, twisted forms it favored.

Although its motifs are typical of Tiffany’s work, this screen is now unique. As far as is known, only two screens were ever made by Tiffany, and the other one, which was ordered specially for the White House, has since been destroyed. Of course, such things were always expensive: this screen probably cost around $750 at a time when few workers made as much as $1,000 a year.

It was typical of Tiffany that he chose to produce the relatively rare and expensive. From the very beginning of his career, he was one of a small group of designers who felt that quality came first, that everyday objects should be beautiful, and that the United States should develop its own styles instead of importing either the object or the fashion from Europe. By 1879 Tiffany already had helped found his Associated Artists, the first American firm committed to originality as well as to excellence in the decorative arts.

Tiffany was to American decorative arts what Thomas Edison was just then to industry.

It was not just a question of making objects either. Tiffany’s stained-glass windows were in tremendous demand as well, so much so that in 1893 he opened his own foundry. The work he did there fitted right into the prevalent Art Nouveau look in which the public spaces of a house—entrance hall, living room, dining hall —often were thought to require a colored-glass window. Although it was a remnant of the Victorian tendency to make a cottage look like a shrunken cathedral, the mode endured; only now, the stained glass had to look right with the twining furniture, the off-color walls and upholstery— gray-greens, rather muddy mauves, extinguished chartreuses—and, of course, the architecture. As a leading and highly creative exponent of the style, Tiffany was an obvious source for stained glass. Although the screen is now unique, dozens of windows were produced in Tiffany’s workshops, and today thousands of fakes tempt the unwary.

Tiffany took many of his motifs from nature, and he worked hard at creating new materials to complement these motifs. It took steady experimenting with semi-opaque window glass to achieve the opalescent Favrile, that light made into solid form, which he used to fashion flower-shaped vases. At the same time, simplicity was important: the bowers, the open spaces on the screen, reflect a highly sophisticated sense of composition, where the most striking effect can be had by avoiding fussiness.

It was this kind of sensibility—together with the quality of his pieces—that made Tiffany one of the most successful men in America. And his achievement also seemed just right for the national mood. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s exhortation to empire came out in the 1890s; while Tiffany designed his glass, Theodore Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill and eventually became a President with a yen for expansion: for the first time the United States began to be recognized as a major power.

Tiffany belonged in this heady atmosphere. He, too, developed his craft and grew rich from it. It says something for the quality of his achievement that today Tiffany glass is sought quite as earnestly in Europe as it is here. America, until Tiffany, had been a country where liberty flourished but the best consumer goods came from abroad. By the time Tiffany was done, it had become clear that he was to the decorative arts what Thomas Edison was, just then, to the industrial world: the inventor of a new, specifically American product of extraordinary quality that could compete against anyone anywhere.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "September/October 1988"

Authored by: John S. Watterson

SMU isn’t playing this season; men on the team were accepting money from alumni. That’s bad, of course; but today’s game grew out of even greater scandal.

Authored by: The Editors

Reflections of a World War II Aviator

Authored by: The Editors

Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900

Authored by: The Editors

A Picture Postcard Record of Mexico’s Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910-1917

Authored by: The Editors

Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States

Authored by: The Editors

The Transformation of the American Diet

Authored by: Greg Mitchell

To keep Upton Sinclair from becoming governor of California in 1934, his opponents invented a whole new kind of campaign

Authored by: Jack Larkin

Forget your conventional picture of America in 1810. In the first half of the nineteenth century, we were not at all the placid, straitlaced, white-picket-fence nation we imagine ourselves to have been. By looing at the patterns of everyday life as recorded by contemporary foreign and native observers of the young republic and by asking the questions that historians don't think to ask of another time—what were people really like? how did they greet one another in the street? how did they occupy their leisure time? what did they eat?—Jakc Larking brings us a portrait of another Americna, an America that was so different from both our conception of its past life and its present-day reality as to seem a foreign country.

Authored by: A. R. Gurney

For generations it was the mainspring, the proof, and the reward of a civilized social life. Now, a fond student of the ritual looks back on the golden age of the dinner party and tells you just how you should have behaved.

Authored by: Gary A. Reynolds

He was the best society portraitist of his day. But that day came to an end.

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.