TIFFANY STUDIOS | A RARE AND EARLY PAIR OF "TURTLE-BACK" LANTERNS

Lillian Nassau, New York

Collection of John and Katsy Mecom, Houston, Texas

Sotheby’s New York, Highly Important Tiffany Lamps from the Collection of John W. Mecom, Jr. Houston, Texas, April 22, 1995, lot 18

Robert Koch, Louis C. Tiffany: The Collected Works of Robert Koch, Atglen, PA, 2001, pp. 124 and 280 (for period photographs of a related "Turtle-Back" lantern in situ at Laurelton Hall)

Martin Eidelberg, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Nancy A. McClelland and Lars Rachen, The Lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany, New York, 2005, p. 41 (for the above mentioned period photograph)

Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate, New York, 2006, p. 137 (for the above mentioned period photograph)

Alastair Duncan, Tiffany Lamps and Metalware, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2007, p. 282, no. 1097 (for one of the present lanterns illustrated)

Timeless Beauty, The Art of Louis Comfort Tiffany, The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Atglen, PA, 2016, pp. 108 (for the above mentioned period photograph) and 109 (for a related "Turtle-Back" lantern with related hardware)

Louis Tiffany was intrigued by utilizing colored glass in all manner of lighting fixtures and incorporated highly innovative designs into his earliest interior decorating commissions. Among these were “sconces of jeweled glass set in a lead framework” for the Blue Room of the White House in 1882. This fascination took full flight with the establishment of the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in 1892.

The pair of exceptional hanging fixtures offered here are interesting for several reasons. They were made early in the company’s history, likely prior to 1895, based on the opalescent glass used and the lack of any patina on the leading. They were also presumably originally intended to be lit by a gas flame and not an electric bulb. The unusual angled and flared opening in the back perhaps indicates that they were originally installed in a room with rounded walls. This clever alteration would have permitted the globe to hang flat against the wall so light would only illuminate the opalescent glass and not leak out of the back and diminish the desired effect. The geometric design is of an unknown pattern, but is highly reminiscent of the Indian Basket hanging shade, currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, designed by Tiffany for Robert and Emily de Forest in 1899.

Special mention needs to be made of the "Turtle-Back" tiles employed. These are not the later, more familiar examples, which were made of opalescent white, blue, green or red glass enhanced with a heavy multi-hued surface iridescence. Instead, these molded tiles were made with transparent clear and green-tinted iridized glass with heavy brown internal speckling, creating a dazzling tortoise-shell effect when the globes are illuminated.

Beyond their aesthetic beauty and technical complexity, these fixtures are important examples of Tiffany’s earlier efforts in lighting interior living spaces. Tiffany's admiration for this form is evidenced by the inclusion of a similar spherical lantern design with Turtle-Back band installed in the living room at Laurelton Hall. That lantern is suspended by a chain with a dramatic drop, similar to the present lanterns. In the present lot, the lanterns are outfitted with complementary hanging hardware comprised by a network of interlocking circles. Much like the shades themselves, the suspension hardware is highly artistic, making the lanterns as a unit appear particularly refined and jewel-like.

PAUL DOROS