ARTISTRY, CHEMISTRY, SECRECY
Mix 12 oz. silver nitrate, 4 oz. uranium,
4 oz. manganese, 4 oz. arsenic, 12 oz.
potash nitrate. Add to 100 lb. of molten
glass. Combine with artistry, chemistry,
and secrecy. The result: “Gold Lustre,”
a signature glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany,
also called iridescent for its lustrous
finish.
Tiffany, the New York artist who
gained renown from the 1880s through
the 1920s for his colorful windows and
mosaic lamps, began as a painter but
moved on to a palette of minerals and
metal oxides with which he created
delicately hued and textured glasses.
Unlike stained glass artists of his time,
Tiffany mixed the colors into his glass
rather than painting them onto it (Figure
1). Experimentation in his labs, conducted
by skilled chemists and glass
workers, found that the addition of gold
to a batch of glass would give red; cobalt,
blue; uranium, yellow; iron oxide, green.
For every color needed, for every leaf or
blade of grass, a new formula was found
that provided the required shade.
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| "Tiffany, the New York artist who
gained renown from the 1880s through
the 1920s for his colorful windows and
mosaic lamps, began as a painter but
moved on to a palette of minerals and
metal oxides with which he created
delicately hued and textured glasses." |
|
Those formulas, key to the art of
creating multilayered scenes in glass,
were a closely kept secret in the Tiffany
shops. In fact, his chief chemist, Arthur
J. Nash, reportedly never shared them
even with Tiffany himself. Not that it
mattered. Tiffany, experts in art and glass
agree, was not a master of chemistry but of artistry and industry. He hired the best
people he could find to execute his vision
of painting nature in glass (Figure 2).
The business plan worked for years,
but by the time he died in 1933, styles
had changed and Tiffany’s glass corporation
was bankrupt. Dragonfly lamps
(Figure 3) were boxed and hidden away
in attics and basements, artifacts of an
Art Nouveau movement gone musty.
(Read about a university’s long-hidden
Tiffany window in the sidebar.) Starting
around the 1970s, though, Tiffany’s color
and style was rediscovered. His lamps
became ever more valued, with standout
specimens bringing more than a million
dollars at auction.
Tiffany is back, and not likely to fade
from the arts scene again. His work, more
than a century old, is still being deconstructed,
studied, cataloged, and imitated.
And as more information about
his business surfaces, appreciation of the
science behind the glass grows.
THE ONLY COLLECTION LIKE IT
At his peak, Tiffany’s decorative skills
could be found in the homes of the
wealthy or at the altars of churches
(Figure 4). He was multitalented: an
interior decorator, a painter, and a
designer. But Tiffany is best known for
his glass, which can still be viewed in
its unfinished form at the Neustadt Collection
of Tiffany Glass, housed in the
Queens Museum of Art in New York.
The Neustadt collection provides a
look at the starting point for Tiffany’s
colorful products: the collection includes
164,000 pieces of sheet glass left behind
when Tiffany’s studio went bankrupt. In
this multihued cache of raw materials
can be found the green of grass and the
green of trees. The green of daffodil
leaves and the green of zinnia leaves. As
nature required, Tiffany ordered glasses.
The collection has been divided into
colors, then shades of colors, then shades
that feature different textures, such as
drapery glass, which is folded upon itself
for a flowing three-dimensional look.
(See the lower portion of Figure 5 for
examples.)
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| "The Neustadt collection provides a look at the starting point for Tiffany’s colorful products: the collection includes 164,000 pieces of sheet glass left behind when Tiffany’s studio went bankrupt." |
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“We have 41 different shades of
medium green drapery glass, and 13
different shades of light green drapery
glass,” said Lindsy Parrott, collections
manager and associate curator. “There are 22 shades of white in our collection
of drapery glass.”
“Our collection of sheet glass is the
only collection like it,” she said.
For the last seven years, the museum
has been cataloging the glass, which
provides a rare glimpse into the demands
that Tiffany’s intricate designs placed on
his employees.
Early in his career, Tiffany bought his
glass from existing glass houses. But
competition in the stained glass business
was growing fierce in the late 1800s, and
Tiffany’s competitor, John LaFarge, was
buying his glass from the same glasshouse
in Brooklyn that Tiffany contracted
with. To protect his trade secrets,
Tiffany called on his financial strengths
and built his own factory in Queens in
1892. There he could experiment with
colors, make high volumes of glass,
design windows and lamps, and with as
many as 200 employees on the payroll,
manufacture them, all under one roof.
The Industrial Revolution had taken hold,
and Tiffany found a way to mass produce
hand-crafted art (Figures 6 and 7). “Tiffany
brilliantly combined arts industry
with creating one-of-a-kind works of
art,” Parrott said.
The remnants of the Tiffany furnace’s
heyday will continue to be sorted and
cataloged for another year or two, she
said. When the work is done, a permanent
archive will be set aside holding at least
one example of glass of every color,
texture, type, and pattern in the collection.
“This archive will be available for
glass historians to study and will continue
to be included and interpreted in our exhibitions,” she said.
In addition, the museum is studying
the glass, identifying which was made
by Tiffany and which was purchased
from other glasshouses, investigating
how the different colors and textures
were created, and establishing dates for
when the production of various types of
glass began, Parrott said.
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WE THINK THERE’S A TIFFANY WINDOW IN THE BASEMENT
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Until 1997, the arc of Tiffany’s popularity was evidenced in two enormous wooden
crates stored in a dark basement at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. The women’s liberal
arts college more than 100 years ago commissioned a window from an emerging glass
artist—Louis Comfort Tiffany—to honor the first fifteen graduating classes. The artist
agreed to create a window for $650, which was no small sum at the time, and completed
the work in 1889 (Figure A). According to the university, the window featured Tiffany’s
early experimentation with opalescent glass, a milky, shimmering white material, and
included as many as fi ve layers of glass in a technique Tiffany later patented. The method
involved placing a sheet of colored glass over a sheet of opalescent glass, leaving some
space in between the sheets through which light could travel. As a result, Tiffany wrote in
his patent, “a more beautiful play of color is given to the opalescent mosaic, with a less
rigid outline to the color.”
The design itself was not entirely original, though; it was a replication of a scene from
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, featuring the Erythraean sibyl sitting before a book. In
the Chatham version, the sibyl is surrounded by the names of infl uential intellectuals and
scientists who would have a place in any liberal arts curriculum at the time. The prophetess
is looking at a book that is inscribed with Chatham’s motto: “That our daughters would be
as cornerstones, polished after the similitude of a palace.”
The window was hung in the university’s chapel and there it stayed for 36 years,
accumulating all the soot and carbon to be found in Pittsburgh’s steel-making atmosphere.
The dingy art work was finally removed to let in more light, and no more thought was
given to the piece until 1992, when Esther Barazzone was hired as president of Chatham.
She was touring the campus when the talk turned to Tiffany. “I was told, ‘We think there’s
a Tiffany window in the basement,’” Barazzone recalls. “It was in two separate enormous
packing crates that were nailed closed. I tucked the memory away in my head and left.”
A few years later, the university constructed a new science building and was looking
for art to hang in its high-ceilinged atrium. “All of a sudden I remembered what was in
this basement, and we started doing some research on who was the best conservator of
Tiffany. We called the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and asked them. Someone
was down here the next day, they were so excited over such a huge find,” Barazzone
recalled. “They uncrated the box and had a very powerful light shining on it. It was one
of the biggest thrills I ever had looking in there. They corroborated instantly that it was a
Tiffany.”
However, years in the basement had not been kind to the art work. “A good part of it
was broken,” Barazzone said. In some sections, Tiffany’s layers had fallen into one another,
creating a confusing mix of colored glass. With some direction from the Metropolitan, the university hired
a Tiffany restoration
expert. After two years
and $250,000, the work
was cleaned, repaired,
and in 2000 was hung in
a place of prominence
in the science building.
Barazzone can’t begin
to estimate the value
of the former basement
debris. “We think it’s
priceless,” she said.
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DON’T LET ANYONE SEE
YOU MIX THE ABOVE
Although Tiffany fell out of vogue
late in his career, and his works were
relegated to basements and attics, the
artist was never in danger of financial
ruin. He was born into wealth, made a
handsome living selling his art, and when
he died was still living comfortably.
However, the unsung chemists who
figured out how much gold was needed
to make ruby red or the role of silver
nitrate in making luster glass, the craftsmen
who churned out the windows,
lamps, and pottery that Tiffany dreamed
up, were not so fortunate. They never
received the acclaim of their employer,
and for one of those glassmakers, muchpublicized
bitterness resulted:
“Don’t let anyone ever tell you that
Louis C. Tiffany invented Favrile glass.
I personally made it for over 25 years
and he never saw the inside of the lab or
even mentioned a chemical to me. And
he did not know how to make luster
glass.” Such were the angry ramblings
of Leslie Hayden Nash, the son of Arthur
J. Nash, whom Tiffany invited to head
up his glassmaking operation in 1890.
Arthur Nash, who is said to have developed
Tiffany’s iridescent glass, also
known as luster glass, kept a locked
leather notebook filled with formulae for
various glasses. Leslie Nash too, kept
notes, but he punctuated the recipes for
stunning glass colors and effects with
bitter comments on Tiffany.
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| "Don’t let anyone ever tell you that Louis C. Tiffany invented Favrile glass. I personally made it for over 25 years and he never saw the inside of the lab or even mentioned a chemical to me." |
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“LCT = Nuts!” he simply wrote on
one page.
The Nash notebooks, as they came to
be known, are now on microfilm and
since 2004 have been available for public
view at the Corning Museum of Glass
in Corning, New York. On page after
page, Leslie Nash scrawls his belief that
Tiffany built his success dishonestly, on
the work of people who never were
credited. Jealousy of Tiffany’s fortunes
is evident.
The ramblings may be a fascinating
study into the mind of a disgruntled
worker, but the formulae provide insight
into glass chemistry and the secrecy
required of a leading art house. All of
the formulae were coded, with a list of
more than 100 possible ingredients each
assigned a number. For example, 1 stood
for quartz, 50–antimony sulfide, 62 –
manganese, 37–uranium oxide, 24–silver
nitrate, 13–arsenic, and so on. The formulae
were written with the code number
first, and then quantity in first pounds
then ounces. The notebook’s mixture for
blue luster glass, for instance, started
with the following sequence: 24--3--0,
which stood for silver nitrate, 3 lb., 0 oz.
Next came 45--1--0—cobalt oxide, 1 lb.,
0 oz; 62--1--0 meant 1 lb. of manganese;
1--1--0, 1 lb. of arsenic; and finally, 3--
3--0 was 3 lb. potash nitrate.
Nash wrote that the color was prepared
in wooden bowls in the lab and delivered
to the mixer, who put the contents into
the batch, or the clear glass, ready for the
furnace. Mixing was, “done in the lab and
kept secret,” he wrote. Where he listed
the ingredients for gold luster glass, he
added the note, “Don’t let anyone see
you mix the above.”
The Nash notebooks also include some
fascinating tales of the trial and error
involved in achieving desired colors.
“A full rich yellow glass has caused difficulty, you find very much as a general
thing,” Nash wrote. “Dad worked for
years to make a golden yellow glass
containing lead. It is this . . . that gives
a fire to the glass . . . and was the basic
glass batch found in luster glass. Dad noted that uranium had not been used
to any extent but always felt that it had
many good properties.”
Whether Tiffany had any knowledge
of the technology behind his shimmering
glass clouds or vibrant daffodils is
doubtful, even those outside of the Nash
family agree. “As far as has been documented,
Tiffany didn’t have any idea how
to make glass, he didn’t know what the
formulas were—he was the gentleman
artist,” said Parrott. “It seems very clear
that the Nashes are responsible, first and
foremost, for the iridescent glass Tiffany
is known for,” she said.
A PATENTABLE
TECHNOLOGY
As a materials scientist, Gregory
Merkel appreciates the techniques
glassmakers used to keep deep red from
going purple, or how to make sure green
is not too green. And as a collector of
iridescent glass, he appreciates the end
results when the chemists do their job
right. Merkel works in the Crystalline
Materials Research Department at Corning
Incorporated in Corning, New York.
His employer is conveniently close to
the Corning Museum of Glass, where
centuries of glass products and art are
displayed. This small town in rural New
York was built around the glass industries,
a feature that held some allure for
Merkel when he moved here in 1981.
After his arrival in Corning,
he began collecting Aurene glass, an
iridescent glass developed by another
Tiffany competitor, Frederick Carder. “I
became very interested in the science and
technology behind it, why it looks the
way it does, its history,” Merkel said.
He found that both Tiffany and
Carder employed similar techniques to
achieve their effects. The key, he said,
was to incorporate silver ions dissolved in
the glass, subsequently reduce the glass
to form metallic silver at the surface, and
then spray the glass with a solution of
tin salt to form a thin iridescent layer of
tin oxide.
Nash, in his notebooks, reported that
the silver surface required heating the
glass object, while still on the punty, in the
glory hole “with the oil “turned up until the flame appears green.” The effect, he wrote, was “to produce a reducing atmosphere.” The work is plunged in and out of this flame until a silver mirror appears on the surface.” Then, Nash wrote, came the spray with a solution of proto chloride
tin, dissolved in water, on the hot glass
surface. The method was developed after
years of testing, according to Nash.
“AJN (Arthur J. Nash) made literally
thousands of experiments before obtaining
a silver luster and then a copper luster.
The spray of tin solution turned the silver
into a delicate gold or bluish luster.”
Merkel said the reducing flame “would strip oxygen atoms off the surface of the glass. Something in the glass
has to change its charge to compensate,
and silver is most ready to reduce its
charge. The silver precipitates out of the
glass as silver metal,” he said. When the
surface is sprayed with the tin solution
and reheated multiple times, the mirrorlike
surface buckles, he said, forming a
kind of matte, satiny surface.
Merkel said no one is sure who invented
the process, but, if it was Arthur Nash,
working for Tiffany, Merkel believes
he should have patented his iridescent
glassmaking technique. “I couldn’t find
any compositional patents taken out,”
he said of Tiffany. “That surprises me. I suspect that this would have been a
patentable technology at the time.”
THE CREATIVE GENIUS
His glass may be in Queens, and pieces
of Tiffany’s work scattered around the
globe, but the most comprehensive collection
of Tiffany windows, lamps, pottery,
and more can be found at the Charles
Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art
in Winter Park, Florida. The collection
includes the chapel interior designed for
the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition
in Chicago, which ignited worldwide
demand for Tiffany’s work.
Jennifer Thalheimer, collection
manager for the museum, said interest
in Tiffany began to reignite as early as
1948, with a small exhibit of his Favrile
glass vases. “But it wasn’t really until the
1970s and 1980s that general recognition
and admiration has trickled down to the
general public,” she said.
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| "I think there is a really interesting movement today to minimize Tiffany’s role in the work the studios did, but I think it is misguided. " |
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Now, interest is high and is likely to
remain so, Thalheimer believes, despite
the questions Leslie Nash attempted to
raise in his writings. “Like all areas of
Tiffany’s studios, Louis Comfort Tiffany
hired qualified people to handle the day
to day running of the companies while he
continued the overall vision and pushed
the artistic endeavors. Tiffany directed
the production and had great insight
into the daily functioning, but pushed
his designers to attain the goals he set,
leaving room for them to expand and be
creative. Arthur J. didn’t seem to have a
problem with this relationship. . . . Arthur
J’s son is the one who pushed the idea
that the Nashes were the innovators and
Tiffany stole the fame.”
But, Thalheimer wonders, if the
Nashes were so skilled, if they were
the talent behind the operation, why
did the Tiffany legacy die? “I think
there is a really interesting movement
today to minimize Tiffany’s role in the
work the studios did, but I think it is
misguided.”
Lindsy Parrott agrees. Although
Tiffany was known for his high-paid
designers who created lamps and pottery
for the public, and his glassmakers who
fulfilled his vision, she credits him with
being the creative genius to make it all
happen. “No one ever created windows
the way Tiffany did them,” she said.
Maureen Byko is managing editor of JOM.
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