Tiffany Studios

Skinner, Bolton, Massachusetts, December 5, 1986, lot 141

Patricia Pongracz, ed., Louis C. Tiffany and the Art of Devotion, exh. cat., New York, 2012, p. 42

Paul E. Doros, The Art Glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany, New York, 2013, p. 184 (for the present lot illustrated)

Alastair Duncan, Tiffany: Lamps and Metalware, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2019, p. 417, no. 1717 

Louis C. Tiffany and the Art of Devotion, Museum of Biblical Art, New York, October 2012 - January 2013

The Tiffany Glass Company, formed in 1885, quickly established itself as one of this country’s leading designers and manufacturers of leaded glass windows for religious institutions. Louis Tiffany, being a brilliant marketer, soon realized that the enormous number of churches being constructed at the time also needed furnishings as well as windows. To meet this growing demand, he established in 1889 an Ecclesiastical Department that would “embrace all forms of church decoration and "instrumenta ecclesiastica.” Headed by Caryl Coleman and aided by “artists of acknowledged ability and national reputation,” the company offered its services to embellish religious sanctuaries with “all forms of church work in glass, fresco, metal, stone or wood.”

Commissions came slowly to the company, but business increased considerably when, in October 1891, Tiffany and Company transferred its entire ecclesiastical department to the Tiffany Glass Company. Of even greater impetus was the company’s chapel at the 1893 Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. This exhibition was viewed and admired by hundreds of thousands of visitors and included 6 candlesticks of “gold filigree work, in which are embedded semi-precious stones” prominently displayed on the upper retables. The frequently repeated description was a bit misleading, as the candlesticks were actually made of gilt-bronze, not gold. The press and the public, however, long believed that valuable gemstones were used. In 1902, a group of thieves broke into the chapel, at the time located in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (New York City), and stole what they thought were highly valuable jewels encrusting much of the metalwork. The stones were actually glass and, after Tiffany revealed this information, the stolen merchandise was mailed back to the church a week later by the crooks.

This rare pair of candlesticks superbly demonstrate some the finest aspects of Tiffany’s ecclesiastical decorative work. The ornamentation was possibly derived from the Eleanor Vase from the Treasury of Saint-Denis, France. a photograph of which was in the Tiffany Studios archives and is now in the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art. The vase and the candlesticks feature ornate and intricate twisted wirework and inset cabochons. The candlesticks are further enhanced with lozenges of chipped transparent emerald and opalescent white glass set into diamond-shaped frames encircling the lower half of the beautifully formed columns. Tiffany Studios manufactured thousands of candlesticks in a wide variety of models, but the ones made for ecclesiastical commissions appear on the market with great infrequency. As such, the pair offered here, distinguished by their dramatic scale, gives collectors the uncommon opportunity to closely examine and admire objects that are rarely available.

–PD