The show’s displays of favrile glass seem similarly inclusive, ranging from vases whose translucent surfaces seem to be adrift with beautifully deracinated leaves and flowers to pieces whose lustrous surfaces are so pocked and pitted they might have been unearthed at Pompeii.
Within days of the fire and at the Tiffany family’s apply, Hugh F. McKean, one talent who had received a residency at Laurelton Hall in 1930, went to the smoldering mars and pulled out everything namely was relatively intact. Later he and his wife, Jeannette Genius McKean, bought the remains of Laurelton Hall from salvagers.
An early effort is a window from approximately 1880 that was initially used in his family in the Bella Apartments on East 26th Street in Manhattan. Dominated by a dynamic purple zigzag, it is encrusted with several chunks of glass the size of great marbles; it resembles a Roy Lichtenstein brushstroke reworked by Lucio Fontana. At the other extreme are the magnolia windows from Laurelton Hall’s living room, a peaceable combination of white opalescent blossoms circled by expanses of clear glass, with guiding hurl in the manner of magnolia bough.
The Daffodil Terrace once joined the eating apartment and the gardens at Laurelton Hall, the grand estate that Tiffany built for himself from 1902 to 1905 on 580 extensively landscaped acres overlooking Long Island Sound. It is displayed here in an colossal gallery, along with the stained-glass windows whose tracking wisteria vines brought the garden into the dining room, and the imposing pearly marble mantel whose three glass mosaic clocks let diners keep track of the time, the daytime and the month.
These objects, including the Daffodil Terrace, became the core holdings of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Fla., which the McKeans had established in 1942 and named for Mrs. McKean’s grandfather. In 1978 the McKeans gave the Met another Tiffany portico, Laurelton Hall’s entry loggia, which is ashore permanent view in the Engelhard Court in the museum’s American Wing.
“Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate” is the infrequent exhibition that comes with its own porch. And no just whichever porch. The Daffodil Terrace temporarily installed at the Metropolitan Museum is larger than many Manhattan rooms. Its tall marble columns are topped with clusters of yellow flowers — daffodils — made of beat glass, the matter in which Tiffany accomplished his greatest eloquence.
By 1875 Tiffany was costing time in Brooklyn glasshouses, studying the craft. By 1885 he was in the process of melding the English Arts & Crafts notion of the unified interior and the Aesthetic Movement’s adore of eclecticism into an encompassing vision of his own that presaged Art Nouveau.
In 1918 Tiffany established a foundation to retain the estate in perpetuity as a house salon and an artist’s colony. But the Tiffany Foundation fell on hard times. Although it exists today as a grant-giving body, in 1946 it auctioned off the contents of the house, divided the attribute into parcels and sold those also. The current owners of the main house rarely visited.
Had Laurelton Hall survived, it would have been Tiffany’s final work of art, a monument to a aggregate vision on the scale of Frederic Edwin Church’s Persian-Victorian fancy, Olana, built in the late 1860s high upon the Hudson River approach Hudson, N.Y.
Reassembled here for the premier time since Laurelton Hall scalded to the ground in 1957, the Daffodil Terrace adds a fitting Temple of Dendur splendor to a strange and lovely exhibition. It has been organized by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Met’s curator of American decorative arts, and presents a sequence of beauteous objects in quest of a specter.
The exhibition gives an overwhelming list of Tiffany’s artists and interests. His breakfast furniture indicates that in the early 1880s he had thoughts about easy structures and white surfaces that happened to Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Koloman Moser decades after. There are touches of endearing modesty, like a Steinway conscientious piano designed by Tiffany and based on a Middle Eastern breast that seems to be inlaid with mother-of-pearl but is really fair ingeniously carved and painted.
While Tiffany is available to us mostly in bits and pieces, objects like these appear to carry whole earths within them.
There are likewise instances of Japanese, Chinese and American Indian objects that Tiffany owned, was influenced by and displayed at Laurelton Hall, including two astounding Qing empire headdresses made of gilded silver inlaid with gifted blue kingfish feathers.
Tiffany was nativity in 1848, the diligent son of a rich author of the luxury-goods commerce soon known as Tiffany & Company. He set out to be a painter, touring Europe and the Mediterranean and agreeable primarily smitten with Orientalism. But he had more facility than originality, as the paintings and watercolors here attest.
He oversaw a succession of companies and factories where for numerous as 300 artisans produced leaded-glass windows and lamps; favrile-glass vases made by a technique of his own invention; all kinds of objects in enamel and sculptured lumber; and linens, furniture and carpets. With these resources Tiffany charted lavish multicultural living quarters as the richest, maximum adventuresome diagrams of the Gilded Age, including the collectors H. O. and Louisine Havemeyer.
The Daffodil Terrace, ahead Laurelton Hall’s ebb. More Photos »
But the chief attraction is the cup, according with the small, murky photographs of Laurelton Hall’s internals and of Tiffany’s city interiors that led up to them. The show encompasses a near-retrospective of stained-glass windows, and the best reveal the another ways Tiffany translated either the gestural and the descriptive powers of painting into an wholly extra tactile medium.
Magnolia windows from Laurelton, the Tiffany estate on Long Island. More Photos >
An inveterate shopper and cultural scavenger, he must have achieved that his love of the foreign — Egyptian, Persian, Asian and North African — might be best expressed in objects, and that these objects could be orchestrated into seductive living contexts that no painting could mate.
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