Tiffany Studios

Collection of Maude B. Feld, New York

Thence by descent to Alan W. Feld and Suzanne C. Feld, 1995

Martin Eidelberg, Nina Gray and Margi Hofer, A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls, New York, 2007, p. 81 (for the present lot illustrated)

“’All my life,’ said Mr. Tiffany, in answer to the reporter’s question, ‘I have had a fancy for collecting bits of glass. As a boy I was fond of the bright-colored jewels in my father’s shop, and the passion for color grew with age.’” With this love of glass fragments and the eye of a supreme colorist, it was only natural that Louis Tiffany would be drawn to the art of mosaics.

Well before the founding of the Tiffany Glass Company in 1885, he incorporated mosaic details in several of his most important interior design commissions, including the Veterans’ Room in the Seventh Regiment Armory, the White House and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s mansion.

Tiffany mosaics quickly became world-renowned and continued to be a major decorative element for decades. He came to the conclusion early in his commercial career that women were better suited to the creation of objects of this type than men. These so-called “Tiffany Girls,” led by Clara Driscoll, superbly translated the artists’ designs with their unrivalled skill in glass selection, a task that required a remarkable degree of patience as well as talent. Most of their work was displayed in religious and commercial buildings, but they also included mosaics in a limited number of “fancy goods” such as the exceedingly rare inkstand offered here.

The base is of patinated bronze that is finely cast with lily pad vines, flowers and buds that is highly suggestive of the firm’s Lily lamps. Nestled within the base is the oviform body that is beautifully enhanced with Favrile glass mosaic Damascene tesserae in shades of orange-red, ochre, blue, green and brick red, all with a multi-hued iridescence. Over the inkwell is a patinated bronze cover wonderfully cast with a butterfly in high relief. This unrecorded inkstand is another reminder of Tiffany’s design genius and the artistic skills possessed by Clara Driscoll and her “Tiffany Girls.”