Tiffany Studios

"An Object Well Worth Striving For": "Cypriote" Glass

In 1877 the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased, for $60,000 in gold, over 20,000 objects discovered and removed from Cyprus by “General” Luigi di Cesnola, the United States consul to that country from 1865 to 1877. Americans were fascinated by the collection, much of which consisted of iridized and pock-marked ancient glass that had gradually decayed. Its aesthetic and commercial possibilities were directly addressed in an 1891 article: “If the effects secured by long ages of treatment in Nature’s laboratory coulda be produced artificially on modern glass at a reasonable cost, it would seem to be an object well worth striving for.” Comments such as this reinforced Louis Tiffany’s desire to improve and master artificial iridescence, and eventually led to his glasshouse’s production of a type of glass known today as Cypriote.

Iridescent vases with pitted surfaces were made by Tiffany’s glasshouse as early as 1895. Although originally thought to have been made solely by rolling broken bits of glass into the hot gather on a blowpipe, it is now evident that potassium nitrate, better known as saltpeter, also played an important role. It was this chemical, when mixed with the small glass shards, that bubbled and burst due to the heat of the glass on the blowpipe, creating the random oval pitting that is the primary characteristic of Cypriote vases.

One of the pieces offered here is representative of the firm’s earlier work while the other was produced approximately 15 years later. Lot 420, made around 1900, has a highly unusual copper-speckled dark brown exterior. It is enhanced with the expected innumerable small craters, but also has slightly recessed creases and rivulets over the entire body. The dark brown surface is beautifully contrasted by the two large iridescent gold heart shapes and the uneven iridescent blue rim. The second Cypriote vase (lot 421) also has an uneven rim, but that is where the similarities end. The pock-marking on the exterior is far less intense and the bright iridescent violet-blue exterior is interspersed with irregular tan patches having a gold iridescence. Columns of feathered creamy yellow plumes within green cartouches, rather than contrasting with the exterior, serve as a wonderful complement.

Cypriote vases such as these are emblematic of Tiffany’s glassblowers’ ability to translate ancient precedents into truly innovative and modern objects. It led one contemporary critic to proclaim: “Each piece of glass is full of artistic suggestiveness, as well as atmosphere and light. It is the work of an American for American art, and well may he be proud of all its beauty, for the glass of Cyprus, which has been gaining new tints with every year of its buried existence, is but the rival, not the superior, of this American Favrile glass.”

- PD