"Truth" Mosaic Panel

Second Church, Boston, Massachusetts

Ruggles Baptist Church, Boston, Massachusetts

Skinner, Bolton, Massachusetts, September 30, 1983, lot 500

The Society of the Second Church in Boston, ed., The Second Church in Boston Commemoration Services, Boston, 1900, p. 26 (for a period photograph of the present lot)

William H. Thomas, "The Art of Mosaic," Munsey's Magazine, vol. 28, no. 3, December 1902, p. 424 (for a period photograph of the present lot)

Thomas Van Ness, "A Nest of Liberty," Outlook, vol. 75, no. 10, November 7, 1903, p. 557 (for a period photograph of the present lot)

James G. Smart, "Truth," Quarterly of the Stained Glass Association of America, vol. 3, no. 1, 1998, pp. 24-31

In mosaics, almost as much as in stained glass windows, there is necessary to their eminence a feeling for rich color which must be innate since it cannot be acquired.

-THE ART WORK OF LOUIS C. TIFFANY (1914)

Louis Tiffany was aware of ancient mosaics, possibly even seeing those in Ravenna during his first trip to Italy in 1865 at the age of 17. Well before the founding of the Tiffany Glass Company 20 years later and with an abiding fascination with brightly colored “bits of glass,” 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.

These early attempts were relatively unsophisticated, both aesthetically and in terms of craftsmanship. Tiffany, however, was drawn to the medium as a means of artistic expression as well as for financial reasons. The number of houses of worship being built in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century was growing exponentially. Leaded glass windows, a field in which Tiffany and his firms would soon be dominant, were a natural decorative element for ecclesiastical purposes. Walls, particularly where natural light was unavailable, also needed to be enhanced and mosaics were the perfect alternative.

Tiffany’s mosaics were used in a moderate number of buildings, but that aspect of his business was catapulted by two events in 1893. First, he established the Stourbridge Glass Company in Corona, Queens, which expanded his available palette to an almost infinite number of color combinations and textures. Perhaps of greater significance was the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company’s Chapel at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Mosaics, incorporating over 400,000 tesserae, were used extensively throughout the building and were seen by almost 2 million visitors in the first three months of the fair.

Tiffany mosaics quickly became world-renowned and continued to be a major decorative element for decades. In a time when building fires were a near-constant concern, the company brilliantly, and continually, marketed that these panels were impervious to fire, water and smoke damage and would withstand the ravages of time for centuries, just as the ancient Roman examples had. Also, as was the case with their leaded glass windows, the firm’s mosaics appealed to national pride: a reporter, in discussing Tiffany’s mosaics for the Marquette Building in Chicago, wrote: “Glass mosaics, such as the ones in question, are today nowhere else made with such art and beauty as in America.”

Almost as important as American jingoism, the glass and his marketing talents was Louis Tiffany’s ability to discover craftsmen with sufficient skill to translate the artists’ cartoons into an actual work. Importing Italian mosaicists, then the acknowledged masters of the art, would have been the easiest solution. Tiffany, however, decided on a radically different scheme. He believed the European workers, accustomed to creating mosaics by the “direct” method, in which mosaics were created in situ directly into wet cement, would not willingly accept his preference for the “indirect” approach, where the tesserae were assembled on an easel and cement was then poured over the glass. So he decided that it would not do to import mosaic workers from Italy, as these would have their own traditions and ideas. He concluded that the persons who could do this work most successfully were the young women from the art schools in this city [New York]. He believed that they had their color sense more fully developed than any men he could get, and that they were trained in form and the use of their hands.

These so-called “Tiffany Girls,” led by Clara Driscoll, superbly translated the artists’ designs with their unrivaled skill in glass selection, a task that required a remarkable degree of patience as well as talent. Their outstanding abilities are on full display in the mosaic panel offered here. Entitled “Truth,” it was designed by Frederick Wilson (1858-1932). A native of Ireland, he immigrated to the United States in 1892, was hired by the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company the following year and eventually became the head of its Ecclesiastical Department in 1899. Wilson was better known for his leaded glass window designs, being awarded a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle for his work in that field. He did, however, also design a limited number of mosaics for the firm, including those for the Wade Memorial Chapel (Cleveland). “Truth” is another superb example.

The panel was created in 1899 to the memory of John W. Leighton (1825-1897) for the Second Church of Boston, where Cotton Mather was at one time its minister. It was prominently placed on the front wall of the church’s interior, directly above the altar. As with all of Wilson’s designs for Tiffany, “Truth” is replete with symbolism. The life-sized robed allegorical figure, set against a variegated gold background, is wearing the key of Knowledge around the neck while holding the sword of the Spirit and Justice in its right hand and the flame of Enlightenment in the left. The figure is bordered on each side by slender frankincense trees, signifying righteousness and holiness, with twisted trunks and ornate blue, green and mauve foliage. Accompanying the panel was a now-lost bronze plaque that included the inscription “The Truth shall set you free.”

The glass used in the creation of the figure is of particular interest. The objects depicted in most of Tiffany’s mosaics are represented through the use of tesserae of a general uniform tonal consistency. This mosaic employs a very different artistic method. The robe, which appears off-white from a distance, is actually comprised of glass in shades of yellow, peach, teal, white, pale lavender, violet, sky blue, plum and red. The face is similarly composed of green, pink, lime, mauve, cream and red tesserae. The overall effect is highly suggestive of Pointillism, an artistic technique developed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac only 12 years prior to the creation of “Truth.”

Tiffany mosaics in any form are a rare commodity to be treasured. A contemporary critic, in reviewing a number of the firm’s mosaic panels in 1906, accurately proclaimed: “Today, the artist, glassmaker and craftsmen work in unity, with one purpose, to produce the best, the most artistic results. They have succeeded, and their accomplishments in glass mosaics are, unquestionably, the best of all times, and they have given a new distinction to an old art.” “Truth,” with its impressive scale and supreme artistry, beautifully confirms this conviction.

–PD