Although today most commonly known for their diamonds, Tiffany & Co started as a stationery store prior to the American Civil War. But the area where Art Nouveau really impacted Tiffany was stained glass. Louis Comfort Tiffany, the son of one of the original owners, was a interior designer who took an interest in glassworking after a trip to Europe. When he became Tiffany’s first Design Director, he added stained glass to the store repertoire focused around jewelry.
His philosophy was to improve on the paned glass of the Arts-and-Crafts movement and bring back the texture and deep colors created by the impure and uneven glass of the Gothic era … and previous, he was specifically inspired by the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection of Roman & Syrian glass. Although he didn’t eschew painting although, polychrome painting was frequently used for faces in his artwork. Beyond that, he replicated and even invented new types of glass to add texture to the windows.
The most common type was opalescent glass, where two different colors were combined — whether through fusing, lamination, or a surface application of silver nitrate.
Streamer glass was used for grasses, twigs, anything that needed a thinly lined texture, while fracture glass was used to distant foliage, etc. They were both made by pressing thin cooled glass into molten sheet glass. For streamer, the cooled glass was long thin strands, formed when uber hot molten glass was stretched into long thin strands from the end of a rapidly swung pontil. Fracture cooled glass was shards of a glass bubble swiftly blown from a blowpipe until the bubble walls become very thin and cool rapidly. Streamer-Fracture glass had both types of cooled glass added to the sheet glass.
Ripple glass, used for leaves and water, and drapery glass, used in ecclesiastical windows for robes and wings, were made by working the sheet glass directly. Ripple glass was created when the spinning roller used to flatten the sheet spun faster than it rolled (they usually roll and spin at the same speed). Drapery glass required the use of a small hand-held roller to manipulate the glass into ripples, folds, and creases.
Ring mottle glass and favrile glass were Tiffany originals. The recipe for ring mottle was lost when the Tiffany glass studio closed down, and not rediscovered until the 60s by a different glass shop, Uroboros Glass. Favrile glass was treated with metallic oxides at the molten stage so when it cooled, it had an iridescent surface texture. Tiffany won the grand prize at the 1900 World Exposition in Paris for his favrile glass.
