Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection

Tiffany Studios, Group of lamps (birds-eye detail). Photograph by John Faier. © 2013 The Richard H. Driehaus Museum.

A celebration of beauty, this traveling exhibition features more than 60 objects, spanning more than 30 years of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s prolific career.

(Sacramento – April 30, 2021) – The Crocker Art Museum is pleased to announce Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection, a lavish overview of Tiffany’s mastery of color and form in a wide range of materials and decorative styles, with a focus on glass, on view from June 6, 2021 through September 12, 2021.

A celebration of beauty, Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection features more than 60 objects, spanning over 30 years of Tiffany’s prolific career. One of America’s most renowned artists, Louis Comfort Tiffany worked in nearly all the media available to artists and designers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including glass, ceramic, and metalwork.

Tiffany’s technical brilliance in a wide variety of media enabled him to convey his awe of the natural world through a range of objects, from common household items like vases and lamps to large masterpieces such as stained-glass windows. He earned international acclaim for his artistic output, receiving prestigious awards in exhibitions across Europe and the United States.

His work was enthusiastically collected by art museums and private collectors throughout his lifetime and continues to be highly sought after today. This exhibition, from Chicago’s distinguished Richard H. Driehaus Collection, focuses on Tiffany’s magnificent stained-glass windows, floral vases, lamps, and accessories, highlighting masterworks never before presented in a comprehensive exhibition.

Tiffany Studios, Miniature Vases, detail, 1898–1900, blown glass. Photograph by John Faier. © 2013 The Richard H. Driehaus Museum.

LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY

Louis Comfort Tiffany was born in New York City on February 18, 1848, and began his career as a painter, studying at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He expanded his repertoire through his work as an interior designer, and began working at a glassworks in Brooklyn, where he developed some of his signature methods of making glass and experimented with new glass forms and techniques.

In 1894, he patented the poetic term “Favrile,” from the Latin word fabrilis, meaning handmade, to describe the iridescent blown art glass he produced. In late 1897, Tiffany built his own glass furnace in Corona, Queens, New York, which produced Favrile and other unique varieties of glass for use in ecclesiastical and secular stained-glass windows, lamps, vases, mosaics, and accessories.

Tiffany Studios, Garden Landscape Window, 1900–1910. Leaded glass. Photograph by John Faier. © 2013 The Richard H. Driehaus Museum.

While the magnificence and exceptional quality of Tiffany glass made this medium the most significant of his career, he continued to innovate, expanding his operations into enamels, pottery, and jewelry. Despite the enormous success he experienced in his many interrelated businesses over his long career, Tiffany’s work went out of vogue with the advent of modernism. Tiffany’s work received renewed appreciation in the mid-twentieth century and continues to be associated with unparalleled quality and beauty to this day. When Tiffany died in 1933, the New York Times obituary counted him “among the best known of American artists.”

A catalogue, Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection is available for purchase in the Crocker Museum Store.

The exhibition is curated by David A. Hanks, Curator of the Stewart Program for Modern Design, Montreal, and is the consulting curator for the George R. Kravis II Collection. The Crocker’s in-house curator is Jayme Yahr, Ph.D.

Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection was organized by the Richard H. Driehaus Museum and is toured by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC.

EXHIBITION RELATED EVENTS AND PROGRAMS

• Gallery Interactive: Looking at Glass (5/1)
• Studio Experiences: Nature in Watercolor (6/2 – 6/4)
• Studio Experiences: Glass Fusing for Beginners (6/6, 13 & 19)
• Parents Connect (6/17)
• The Official Rogue Book Club: Clara and Mr. Tiffany (6/24)
• The Tiffany Tour (7/8, 7/15, 7/22, 7/29, 8/6, 8/13, 8/20, 8/27)
• Art and Business in the Life and Work of Louis Comfort Tiffany (7/15)
• Class Series: The Art and History of Gilded Age America (7/13, 20 & 27)
• Teacher Workshop Series: American History and the Arts (7/27, 8/10, 8/24)
• Art Rx: Slow Looking Program (8/14)
• Studio Experiences: Jewelry Making (TBD)
• Family Fun: Tiffany Glass (8/9)

ABOUT THE CROCKER
The Crocker brings people together and connects them in unexpected ways with art, ideas, each other and the world around them. Founded as a public/private partnership in 1885, the Crocker features the world’s foremost display of California art and is renowned for its holdings of master drawings and international ceramics, as well as European, Asian, African, and Oceanic art. The Crocker serves as the primary regional resource for the study and appreciation of fine art and offers a diverse spectrum of exhibitions, events, and programs to deepen visitors' understanding of art, including films, concerts, studio classes, lectures, and an array of activities for families and children. More information about exhibits and programs can be found at crockerart.org.

ABOUT THE COLLECTION
The Richard H. Driehaus Collection is one of the country’s most important private collections of works by American decorative designer Louis Comfort Tiffany. Widely recognized as the gold standard for American decorative objects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, works by Tiffany and his associated firms are a core collecting area for Richard H. Driehaus. Since acquiring his first Tiffany Studios stained-glass window in 1978, the businessman and philanthropist expanded his collection to over 1,500 Tiffany works, including ecclesiastical and secular windows, Favrile glass, vases, lamps, candlesticks, accessories, and furniture, to preserve for future generations as well as to enjoy personally.

In 2003, The Richard H. Driehaus Museum was founded in Chicago to preserve and publicly exhibit American and European fine and decorative arts of the Gilded Age (1870–1900). Today, the Museum, which opened to the public in 2008 after an extensive five-year restoration, is a stunning showcase for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and design, displayed against the magnificent interiors of the historic Samuel M. Nickerson Mansion (1879–1883).

International Arts & Artists in Washington, DC, is a non-profit arts service organization dedicated to increasing cross-cultural understanding and exposure to the arts internationally, through exhibitions, programs and services to artists, arts institutions and the public. Visit www.artsandartists.org.