Tiffany Studios

A New Experimental State –

Favrile Pottery

Although glass was Louis C. Tiffany’s favorite decorative medium, he also had a deep affinity for ceramics. This attraction likely began as a child, when he was a frequent visitor to Tiffany & Co., the business started and later owned by his father. There, Louis could admire both antique pottery for sale, as well as contemporary works by such illustrious European firms as Royal Copenhagen, Royal Doulton and Royal Berlin. Later, as a founding member and instructor at the Society of Decorative Arts in the late 1870s, Tiffany was aware of the numerous china decorating classes offered to the students, as well as the organization’s ceramic exhibitions. He later incorporated Persian and other exotic earthenware tiles into the interiors of all three of his private residences. Tiffany Studios held a major exhibition of French ceramicists, including Dalpayrat, Bigot and Doat, in early 1901 and, later that year, Tiffany’s leaded glass lamp shades began being paired with bases made by Grueby. 

It was natural for Tiffany, with this considerable background in the artistic and commercial aspects of pottery, would want to expand his company’s oeuvre. The process began in late 1900:

The Keramic Studio takes pleasure in announcing the fact that Mr. Louis Tiffany is busy experimenting in pottery, which no doubt means that he will finally produce something as artistic as his Favrile glass… Mr. Tiffany is in the experimental state, but that he had been so charmed with the work of artist potters at the Paris Exposition, that he came home with the determination to try it, and that he would probably produce something in the luster bodies.

As he did with mosaics, fancy goods and leaded glass lamp shades, Louis C. Tiffany hired women to operate his new pottery division. Danish-born Edith Lautrop (1875-1963) was appointed the first head of the department. Alice Gouvy (1863-1924) and Lillian Palmié (1873-1944), already working with enamels, were additionally assigned to the pottery department. With glazes developed by Arthur J. Nash, the glasshouse’s superintendent, the women worked tirelessly to create stable body and glaze combinations that could survive being fired in the kiln. 

They succeeded by 1904 and Tiffany’s “Favrile Pottery” made its first public appearance at the St. Louis World’s Fair of that year. Production was limited but a critical success. A magazine article two years later gave a detailed description:

The great facilities of the Tiffany Furnaces made it possible to conduct experiments on such a large scale that excellent results could be obtained very promptly. The body used is in porcelain, but for the plastic decorations other clays are employed. The slender forms chosen often approach those of the Favrile glassware. But while the last shows plant motifs in the forms of objects themselves, in the Tiffany ceramics plastic decorations are used. Water plants, especially the lotus and the poppy, are employed with great taste, and various kinds of creepers, cereals and the fuchsia… The vases are of exquisite beauty.

The two examples offered here are prime examples of the work produced by the Tiffany Studios. The “Trumpet Creeper” example (lot 218) has already been discussed, but the low vase modeled with fish swimming among waves (lot 219) must be mentioned. It clearly evokes the early and lasting influence Japanese art had on Louis C. Tiffany’s aesthetic and the subsequent implementation of the theme in his leaded glass windows, lamp shades, metalware, enamels and blown glass vases as well as pottery. The glaze is superb, with its teal highlights, and the undulating rim that is a continuation of the waves is a brilliant concept.

Tiffany Studios manufactured a very limited number of pieces because of the great technical difficulties encountered in its production. The division was closed around 1917 and it is estimated that only a total of approximately 2,000 pieces were ever created. These two examples beautifully and completely encapsulate the finest qualities of Tiffany’s pottery. 

- PD