Tiffany Studios

Encased in Glass: The "Paperweight" Technique

Tiffany Furnaces never intentionally manufactured paperweights in the traditional sense, whereby designs composed of either flameworked elements or sliced canes of millefiori were arranged within a hemispherical dome of solid transparent glass. Shortly after 1900, however, his glassworkers developed, and gradually perfected, a type of vase that is today referred to as “paperweight technique.” It proved to be an ideal method of expressing Tiffany’s love of flowers in a revolutionary new glass. This glass was first developed in late 1893 by Arthur J. Nash (1849-1934), the glasshouse’s superintendent, and was soon famous around the world by its trademarked name: “Favrile.”

The initial attempts at creating Paperweight vases resulted in relatively simple floral designs, with many of them including production flaws due to the complexity of the technique. A gather of clear glass at the end of a blowpipe was rolled over thin sections of solid glass or millefiori carefully arranged on the marver. The inlaid marvered design expanded as the glassblower enlarged the gather and then the entire vase was covered with a layer of transparent glass that encased the decoration. The final step was to place the object into a reduction oven where fumes of metallic salts were introduced, forming a gold or orange-gold iridescence on the interior surface.

Tiffany Furnaces decided to move away from creating Paperweight vases with an interior iridescence approximately 13 years after their initial introduction. The impetus for this major shift was the company’s creation of a stabile transparent green-tinted glass that they named “aquamarine.” This new glass and design philosophy permitted the flowers to be the primary focal point, and the transparency of the glass added a greater three-dimensional aspect to the internal decoration. The apple blossom vase offered as lot 402 is a superb example of this new design initiative. The “Morning Glory” vase presented here is even more glorious.

The “Morning Glory” design first appeared in late 1913. According to Arthur’s son Leslie Nash, the company was experimenting with special formulas that created a glass that reacted and changed colors when struck with heat. Louis Tiffany, aware of these experiments, came to Tiffany Furnaces one Monday in October 1913 with a watercolor of morning glories he had recently painted. He showed the painting to Nash and insisted the glasshouse reproduce his painting in glass.

After numerous failures, the gaffers finally succeeded by using five different types of reactive glass. Leslie Nash claimed the company spent $12,000 in materials and labor by the time the first successful “Morning Glory” Paperweight vase was created. The extreme technical and artistic problems that had to be overcome were mentioned when two examples were loaned, and later donated, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Louis Tiffany in 1926: “Exceedingly rare because of the extraordinary difficulty of manufacture are two perfect specimens of what Mr. Tiffany calls his Morning Glory Glass, in which the flowers and leaves, intricately built up from glass of different colors, are imprisoned, as it were, in the transparent walls of the vase.” For this reason, examples that survived were priced at no less than $1000 each, an incredible sum considering that the average New York City worker’s annual salary in 1910 was less than $600.

The vase offered here fully displays the extraordinary skills of Tiffany’s glassworkers. Emerald, forest green and green-streaked and pink-tinged leaves encircle the swollen upper half of the transparent pale, green-tinted body. Numerous cream, fuchsia and violet morning glories are randomly situated and their vivid colors are in striking contrast against the darker foliage. It abundantly demonstrates the supreme artistry of the craftsmen involved in its production and why the motif is justifiably considered one of Tiffany’s quintessential designs.

- PD