Tiffany

The Tiffany Glass exhibition currently at the Reynolda House through November 29 belongs to the Neustadt Collection of Queens, NY--the largest collection of Tiffany Glass in the world. The warehouse in Queens that houses the collection and about a quarter million pieces of Tiffany glass pieces is rarely open to the public. However the nearby Queens Museum has a permanent Tiffany exhibit gallery and traveling exhibitions, like ours, go out across the United States. Dr. Egon Neustadt was an Austrian immigrant who was an orthodontist and real estate developer and starting in 1935, he and his wife Hildegard began collecting Tiffany pieces after discovering a lamp while shopping in Greenwich Village.

Louis Comfort Tiffany was the son of luxury retailer Charles Tiffany. Louis was an artist who successfully used his decorative arts and interior design schemes to attract Gilded Age clients seeking to furnish their elegant mansions. His artistic studios gave rise to other notable player such as Agnes Northrup, his chief female artistic designer; Arthur Nash, an English born chemist who developed numerous formulas and technical processes to create the amazing colored glass needed for the artistic creations; and Clara Driscoll, who managed the women’s class cutting department and who also designed some of the iconic pieces like the Dragonfly and Wisteria lamp shades.

(The name Tiffany is both a surname as in the namesake of this exhibition and also a popular given name usually for girls. It comes from the etymology of the word ‘epiphany’ meaning ‘appearance of God.’)

Stained glass has a history dating as far back as the 7th century. Basically the idea was to stain the outer window glass with a painting so that the light would shine through and illuminate the art. Tiffany expanded that by not only painting the glass but processing the glass itself with colors and textures providing a ‘palette’ of glass pieces to create not only windows, but other decorative objects as well.

Techniques in creating these pieces of the glass palette included painting glass with a vitreous paint--i.e. a paint made from finely powdered glass and metallic oxide pigments--and fired on to the glass. Tiffany called this process “Favrile” glass (from a latin word meaning “make by hand”).

Stained glass is often called leaded glass in that the glass pieces are bordered into place with lead or zinc dividers called “cames.” (Leaded glass should not be confused with lead glass, the latter being a glass that is processed to be exceptionally clear, like crystal stemware).

In addition to a preponderance of forgeries, Tiffany windows are often a general term for the style of a well crafted church stained glass window when they may, in fact, not have been made by Tiffany Studios. For example the beautiful windows at Reynolda Presbyterian are not actual Tiffany windows but were rather designed and made by D’Ascenzo Studios of Philadelphia. There are a number of confirmed Tiffany windows in North Carolina. The only one confirmed in Winston Salem can be found at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

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