Tiffany Studios

The present lot was likely produced for the 1919 Salon des Artistes Français exhibition.

Seeking Color –

Brown Glass

Late 19th Century Americans had grown accustomed to using transparent glass in their everyday use. It enabled them to clearly see whatever the object contained and was easy to keep clean. Opaque brown glass vessels were among the products the public least expected, wanted or apparently needed. Louis C. Tiffany, however, felt differently, and opaque brown vases were among the earliest blown objects produced by his Stourbridge Glass Company. One reviewer of the company’s first significant exhibition of Favrile pieces praised the “brown bowls with their smooth surfaces left, resembling glazed pottery.” Another critic, however, voiced a more expected complaint: “In the matter of color, we prefer the more transparent pieces, for opaque blues, yellows and browns have not the rich quality of the antique glass they imitate.”

Tiffany, though, was not dissuaded. As he wrote in 1893, the same year the Stourbridge Glass Company was founded: “At first, very little attention was paid to mere form. Color, and color only, was the end sought.” It was precisely this attitude that allowed him to attempt to make glass items that had never before been contemplated, or even imagined, by glassmakers of the past.

- PD