While doing a little research today on hurricane lamps, I came upon this article on the famous Tiffany lamps. I found it interesting in that I had always assumed that Louis Tiffany only manufactured lamps and jewelry. In fact interior design was his original forte. He designed the interior for the Mark Twain house in Harford, Connecticut and is best known for the work he was commissioned to do at the White House when President Chester Alan Arthur became president and refused to move in until it was redecorated. There he redesigned, repainted and refurnished the State Dining Room, the Entrance Hall, the Blue Room, the Red Room and the East Room. One of the items he added was his Tiffany glass creations to the gaslight fixtures.
It was a little later in his career that he started to design his now famous lamps which at the time were made from jelly jars and an assortment of colored glass from bottles. It wasn’t until 1893 that he actually built his first factory that was originally called the Stourbridge Glass Company and later named Tiffany Glass Furnaces in Queens New York. In 1900 at the Exposition Universelle hosted in Paris, France, he recieved a gold medal for his stained glass windows The Four Seasons. Tiffany Interiors also used a considerable amount of mosaics in their designs.
In 1902 Louis Tiffany became the first Design Director for Tiffany & Co., the jewelry company founded by his father. Unfortunately Tiffany Studios declared bankruptcy in 1933. At auctions original Tiffany lamps can claim prices in the six figures.
Most fortunately, today, Dale Tiffany is well-known for manufacturing Tiffany-styled lamps and hurricane lamps that are very high-quality reproductions of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s designs.
You can find some examples of Dale Tiffany’s work on some of our other pages.
Here’s a copy of the article I mentioned earlier: [click to continue…]
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