The Art Glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany

Description

Written by Paul Dorors, former curator of glass at the Chrysler Museum of Art, and illustrated with specially commissioned photography by David Schlegel, this superbly produced book is the definitive account of Louis Comfort Tiffany's highly collectible art glass, which he considered his signature artistic achievement, produced between the 1890s and the 1920s. Called Favrile glass - a term presumably coined by Tiffany himself from the same root as the Latin faber (craftsman, artisan) to underscore its one-of-a-kind quality - every piece was blown and decorated by hand. The book presents the full range of remarkably diverse and inventive styles and shapes that Tiffany's glasshouse produced, from the exquisite delicacy of the flowerforms to the dramatically dripping golden flow of the 'Lava' vases, from the dazzling iridescence of the 'Cypriote' vases to the glazed-pottery-like opaqueness of the 'Brown' pieces, and much more. With a Foreword by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and complete with a biography of Louis Comfort Tiffany, a history of the glassworks and its extraordinary technical innovations, and profiles of the glassworkers and scientists who created these unique masterpieces, as well as never-before-published documents and archival photographs of Tiffany and his family, The Art Glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany is an essential addition to the libraries of all lovers of Tiffany, art glass, American Art Nouveau and the decorative arts.

Paul E. Doros, former glass expert in Christie's Twentieth-Century Decorative Arts Department, is the author of The Tiffany Collection of the Chrysler Museum at Norfolk.

'The collections discussed and sumptuously photographed on these pages, many pieces of which are published here for the first time ... serve to inspire future connoisseurs and provide pleasure to all who peruse this volume' - Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, from the Foreword