The Jewelry and Enamels of Louis Comfort Tiffany

For a long time, Louis Comfort Tiffany was known almost solely as an extremely gifted designer of spectacular lamps, favrile glass vases and stained glass windows in a very individual Art Nouveau style. Recently his considerable accomplishments in other areas of the decorative arts have become more widely known and admired. Jewellery design played only a minor part in Tiffany's activities until 1907, five years after he had joined the firm of his father, Charles Tiffany, as artistic director and vice-president. It was for Tiffany and Co. that he produced some of his finest pieces, combining gemstones, enamelling and metalwork in highly original designs of unusual refinement; as well as objects made of enamel on copper, such as vases, bowls and boxes. These were acclaimed at all the international expositions of the period. Tiffany's motifs were largely taken from nature: animals, birds and insects, as well as plant forms. But his work also shows the fruitful influence of oriental and Middle Eastern historical decorative examples.