Louis Comfort Tiffany: Master of Glass, Visionary of Design

The text below is the excerpt of the book Louis Comfort Tiffany (ISBN: 9781781609811), written by Charles De Kay, published by Parkstone International.

“I have always striven to fix beauty in wood, stone, glass or pottery, in oil or watercolor by using whatever seemed fittest for the expression of beauty, that has been my creed.“ – Louis Comfort Tiffany

During his travels in England, France, Germany, and Italy it could not fail to strike a painter possessed of a feeling for color that modern stained glass as produced in Europe lacks the fundamental quality which separates the colored glass window from mosaic, or painting on the wall, that quality, without which the stained glass window may be said scarcely to have a reason for existence. It may be argued in extenuation of the deplorable coldness of this glass that the cloudy skies of northern Europe, the dark atmosphere of great cities, lead people away from such “dim religious light” as the cathedrals favored in the age of the splendor of Gothic architecture.

Practical reasons may well have caused the gradual introduction of lighter tones, especially in palaces, gild halls, town halls, libraries, and other places where it was necessary to have light enough for reading. But this was only one reason. A deeper-going cause was the rarity among artists of the appearance of the color-sense, something that exists or does not exist in a man, something that seems to inhere in the eye or optic nerves, something that no amount of teaching and experience in painting can do more than approximate. Colorists are men apart. At one period they suddenly start up in Holland and form a great art epoch. In the middle of the nineteenth century they appear with Delacroix and the Barbizon men in France. But always they are antagonized and decried by artists and critics who lack the gift, and see nature in outline rather than in color. Being in the majority, the latter persuade the public that color does not count for much when weighted in the scale against form. And they are entirely honest and convinced of in this opinion. Slowly, however, the public comes to see that for such art-products as painting the most important ingredient is color, and in time the colorist is exalted.

Consider a moment the difference between looking at a painting on a solid surface darkened still further by the paint, and looking into a material in which color is fused, this material so placed that light falls through it!

Coming back to America where the skies and atmosphere, summer and winter, seem to ask for interiors and sheltering the eyes from an excess of brilliancy, Louis Comfort Tiffany could not but realize that here was a branch of art neglected, or rather badly served, in Europe, which might offer new fields of delightful work to the new world.

The first windows were mattings, lattices of wood or open-work stone, skins or slabs of ice (under the Arctic Circle), horn, thinly wrought alabaster, and at last glass. And the first glass we may imagine as a material discovered by potters in search of glazing to make their pots impervious to water, which glaze, build up by hand in shapes just like clay, and then subjected to the heat of the kiln, formed the earliest vessels of glass. That the Byzantines had glass windows on the small scale is pretty certain, but window glass as we know it must be credited, not to the people of the Mediterranean, but to those of northern Europe. If they did not invent the use of colored or stained ecclesiastical glass, which apparently they took after the Crusades from the expert glass mosaic artists of the late Greek empire, it is probable that they did begin the use of glass for ordinary windows, pushed by the climate which, in winter at least, exacted a closed room lit from outside.

Language gives us a clue.

The word glass belongs to the Teutonic languages and has been allied to glow and glare, as if it meant the “shining” thing. But the Celts, who preceded the Teutons in Europe, have the same word for a color. Irish glas means gray or bluish gray, like steel. Welsh glass means “blue, greenish gray.” Glaukos, “shining” is a close parallel in Greek. A similar word for amber among the Teutons got into late Latin as “glesum.” We may imagine that the earliest glass imported by the Phoenicians into northern Europe was a kind of bottle glass in gray and blue tones and was called the “blue-gray” stuff by the Celts, who gave the word to the Teutonic tribes, alternately conquered by them or their conquerors in turn. As soon as glass was made in Europe it would be natural that those who could afford the luxury would substitute this material for the parchment or horn used by primitive races of the north in their narrow window openings to let in the light and exclude the cold.

Originally, we must argue by analogy, windows or the gratings in the window were stopped by materials which allowed some light to filter through, but did not permit those inside to see out. Transparent glass is a comparatively late invention. When stained windows, therefore, came up in Europe it found people indifferent because unused to the convenience of transparent panes. The heavy leads and thick, dark-toned panes in old cathedrals, like those of Chartres, Beauvais, York, etc., delighted their eyes and did not bother them by reason of the dimness of the light that fell through. This is a point which should be remembered by those who study old and modern glass windows. There was beauty of color in windows before clear glass panes, transparent as air so much as existed in Europe.

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