Return to Top 50 Homepage

LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY
(American, 1848-1933)
Floraform Vase
Glass
12 3/16 x 5 1/8”
Bequest of George and Susan Proskauer 1992.17.140

Louis Comfort Tiffany was trained as a painter, but after 1880 he devoted himself primarily to decorative work and to the design and production of glass. Tiffany—not to be confused with his jeweler father, Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of the firm that still bears the family name—was an imaginative designer of interiors and an inventive glass artist. He was praised for his stained glass windows, glass mosaics, lamps, and his trademark “Favrile” glassware, for which glass of different colors was combined while still molten, and the was blown and twisted together to achieve stunning freeform shapes and iridescent results. Tiffany was inspired by the natural world around him, and his glass often bears botanical forms, shapes, and colors. This Floraform Vase—more decorative than functional—is a magnificent example of Tiffany’s ability to combine form and decoration. The vase itself is rendered in the shape of a flower, with open petals forming a bowl atop a twisted glass stem. Tiffany’s artistic vision—which gave rise to the popularity of the Art Nouveau style—is also seen in the coloration and “feather pull-up” decoration on the vase, which invites comparison to a flower’s foliate veining.