Louis Comfort Tiffany

Henry Platt, great grandson of Louis Comfort Tiffany

Ms. Thorunn Wathne

Christie's New York, December 9, 2014, lot 837

Alastair Duncan, Louis C. Tiffany: The Garden Museum Collection, Easthampton, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 36

As part of his European itinerary in 1874, Tiffany made a stop in Geneva, Switzerland, where his father’s firm had an office and watch factory. Later, Tiffany produced a series of exhibition paintings based on his experiences there. The most successful of these was As Good as New (Swiss Scene), a major watercolor praised for its masterly detail and humor. It depicted a sidewalk shop overflowing with secondhand wares and two old women haggling over a ceramic pitcher. This painting was exhibited with the American Society of Painters in Water Colors in 1876, where it sold for $1,000 to Jeremiah Milbank (1818–1884), an original subscriber of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was next shown at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

Tiffany’s study for As Good as New (Swiss Scene) is offered here, and it shows that he began working out the complex street scene with a solitary, seated woman absorbed in thought and awaiting customers. Tiffany’s subject and style were likely inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish genre paintings, a large collection of which had been acquired in 1871 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Likewise, renewed interest in such works paralleled the international influence of French realism and modern genre painting.

–RAM