Tiffany Studios

Designing an Icon: The Eighteen-Light "Lily"

This Clara Driscoll design, as iconic in Tiffany Studios’ oeuvre as her Wisteria lamp, is a truly wonderful illustration of the company’s brilliant ability to combine metal and glass. Making its debut at the 1900 Paris Exposition, the lamp was met with international acclaim and was a major factor in Driscoll being awarded a coveted bronze medal.

The idea of creating a lily-inspired lamp was not a new one. An 1897 article describes a New York manufacturer marketing a bronze lamp, its “globe…of English glass in the form of an inverted lily.” The same article mentions a Tiffany Favrile glass lamp with a base that was “encircled with frogs perched upon them. The globe is of opal glass with pond lilies in appliqué; price $550.” This design was modified a few years later when the 18-light lily lamp was first introduced. It was marketed in Tiffany Glass and Company’s 1900 booklet, Lamps and Fixtures, as “No. 383—DINING TABLE DECORATION—(Electric). A cluster of flower-like lights rising from a bed of water plants in antique bronze, and surrounded by a basin, to be used for ferns or plants. Complete, with basin $192. Complete, without basin $152.” This made it the highest priced item in the catalog, even more expensive than the large leaded glass floral chandeliers offered at $150. Table lamps and wall sconces of simpler design and with fewer “blossom globes of iridescent ‘Favrile Glass’,” available in “almost any color,” were presented at a more economical price, ranging from $29.50 to $59.

It was the elaborate 18-light version, however, that the company displayed in its booth at the Paris Exposition. Both models of the 18-light lamp, with and without the planter, were later featured by Tiffany Studios at the first Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna in Turin, Italy in 1902. A German critic noted how well-suited Favrile glass was for electric lighting fixtures: “The translucent light gives completely new, rich effects of the play of colors in the colorful, iridescent glass and the artist's imagination is given further scope. The most tasteful arrangements of this kind included, for example, a bunch of umbel-like flowers that grew up from the table and in each of which glowed an electric light.” It was one of the several reasons why Tiffany Studios was awarded the grand prize and two gold medals at the exposition.

Buyers back home were soon as captivated by the lamp as their European counterparts. A “Things Seen in Shops” article appearing in a 1902 issue of The House Beautiful remarked: “Electric lamps which have a genuine and really poetic beauty to commend them form part of a new Tiffany table decoration. It is a cluster of flower-like lights rising on slender stems from a green bronze base which is modeled into the large circular leaves of pond-lilies and their buds. This is even prettier when surrounded by a basin filled with ferns and other plants.”

The lily model was perhaps the most popular and commercially successful lighting fixture ever created by Tiffany Studios and was being marketed well into the 1920s. The superlative 18-light example offered here masterfully explains the lamp’s popularity. The bronze base is finely cast with a lower section of scalloped lily pads continuing to a band of upturned leaves and spiraled vines, all in a gilt etched metal finish. From this rise 18 finely clustered stems, with a lower swollen section that is missing in many examples, that gracefully curve outwards and descend to varying heights. The stems terminate in petal-shaped fitters, each holding an iridescent gold blossom of transparent yellow Favrile glass with ten undulating tips instead of the standard eight. This lamp epitomizes the collaborative design genius of Louis Tiffany and Clara Driscoll and gives full justification for its iconic status. 

- PD