After Tiffany had formed a partnership with Colman, Lockwood DeForest, and Candace Wheeler, and after having incorporated the interior decorating firm of L.C. Tiffany & Associated Artists, a desire to concentrate on art in glass led Tiffany to choose to establish his own glassmaking firm. The first Tiffany Glass Company was incorporated on December 1, 1885. It became the Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company in 1892, and the Tiffany Studios in 1900. He had used commercial glass houses for 19 years to supply his Manhattan showroom and clients, but wanted to be fully in charge of production and design security. Tiffany was keenly aware of the area's potential and for his furnaces to succeed, he needed to hire the town's pool of experienced immigrant workers, who were then mostly Italian, German, and Irish." With Tiffany later opening his own glass factory in
Corona, New York, he was determined to provide designs that improved the quality of contemporary glass. The factory was the old Tiffany Studios in
Corona, Queens, at the southwest corner of 43rd Avenue and 97th place, where it was used to cast art sculptures of bronze designs for sculptors, and bronze architectural elements such as floor registers, door jambs, window casings, lamps, and sconces, most notably for Tiffany. In 1893, his company also introduced the term
Favrile in conjunction with his first production of blown glass at his new glass factory. Some early examples of his lamps were exhibited in the
1893 World's Fair in
Chicago. At the beginning of his career, Tiffany used cheap jelly jars and bottles because they had the mineral impurities that finer glass lacked. When he was unable to convince fine glassmakers to leave the impurities in, he began making his own glass. Tiffany used
opalescent glass in a variety of colors and textures to create a unique style of stained glass. Tiffany acquired Stanford Bray's patent for the "copper foil" technique, which, by edging each piece of cut glass in copper foil and soldering the whole together to create his windows and lamps, made possible a level of detail previously unknown. This can be contrasted with the method of painting in enamels or glass paint on colorless glass, and then setting the glass pieces in lead channels, which had been the dominant method of creating stained glass for hundreds of years in Europe. specimens from 1896 to 1902 Tiffany trademarked
Favrile (from the old French word for handmade) on November 13, 1894. He later used this word to apply to all of his glass, enamel and pottery. "Tiffany's favrile glass vases were based on Venetian glassmaking techniques mixed with
ancient Egyptian and
Near Eastern inspirations." Tiffany delved into glass-making with interest in Venetian glass-maker
Antonio Salviati. Tiffany would study techniques from Salviati-trained glassmaker, Andrea Boldini. In 1902, Tiffany had been influenced by a
Cypriote line of jewelry that his father, Charles Lewis Tiffany, had introduced earlier at the
Turin World's Fair. He coined this particular line of favrile glass the
Cypriote line. In 1889, at the
Paris Exposition, Tiffany was said to have been "overwhelmed" by the glass work of
Émile Gallé, French
Art Nouveau artisan. "Nash hired many more skilled English artisans. Tiffany's vision, Nash's management, and
Charles Lewis Tiffany's financing resulted in a thriving operation. Stourbridge Glass Company was absorbed by Tiffany into the Tiffany Furnaces in 1902.
Clara Driscoll was one of the many gifted artists employed by Tiffany. Driscoll was born in Tallmadge, Ohio. Driscoll was educated at the
Western Reserve School of Design for Women, and in 1888 moved to New York City to study at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art School. led by Driscoll, played a big role in designing many of the floral patterns on the famous
Tiffany lamp and other creations. From the late 1880s until about 1909, Driscoll supervised many of Tiffany's most celebrated leaded windows and mosaics. and head of the Ecclesiastical Department in 1899. He was among the most prominent and prolific designers:
e.g.,
The Righteous Shall Receive a Crown of Glory (1901);
Angel of the Resurrection (1904);
The Prayer of the Christian Soldier (1919). He worked in his studio at Briarcliff Manor, New York, as well as in the Tiffany Studios factory at Corona, Queens. After 30 years and more than 500 windows designed and executed, he left Tiffany Studios in 1923 and moved to Los Angeles to work for Judson Studios.
Julia Halsey Munson Julia Munson was born in
Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1875. Munson was trained at the Artist-Artisan Institute of New York. Munson's drawings, preserved in Tiffany & Co. archives, exhibit abstract attention to nature's beauty, namely plants and flowers inspired by Tiffany's glassworks. In 1903, Julia Munson became the head of Tiffany & Co.'s jewelry department. She played an important role in developing the enameling techniques used in Tiffany's jewelry, although her significant contributions remained largely unrecognized at the time, as none of the pieces she worked on were signed. One notable example of their collaboration is the
Peacock Necklace (circa 1906), designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and crafted by Munson. The necklace showcases opals, amethysts, sapphires, and
demantoid garnets, all set in intricate cloisonné enamel on gold.
Agnes Northrop Agnes Northrop (1857 – 1953) started as a "Tiffany Girl" and became a designer. In 2024 the
Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired her stained glass
triptych entitled
Garden Landscape.
Finality Tiffany's glass fell out of favor in the 1910s, and by the 1920s a foundry had been installed for a separate bronze company. Tiffany's leadership and talent, as well as his father's money and old firm, allowed Tiffany to relaunch Tiffany Studios as a marketing strategy for his business to thrive. In 1924 the firm underwent a name change, and was renamed the
A. Douglas Nash Company. John Polachek, founder of the
General Bronze Corporation —who had worked at the Tiffany Studios earlier— purchased the Roman Bronze Works (the old Tiffany Studios). General Bronze then became the largest
bronze fabricator in New York City formed through the merger of his own companies and Tiffany's Corona factory. Today, the
Louis Tiffany School or
New York City's P.S. (public school) 110Q, is now built on that site.
Controversy The relations between Louis C. Tiffany and his highly-gifted artisans—such as between Arthur Nash and his family business relationships with Tiffany; or Clara Driscoll, his head designer for lamps and stained-glass windows—will probably never be known. Clara Driscoll's work was never once publicly acknowledged. Arthur Nash, who served as the head of Tiffany's glassworks, was never once publicly acknowledged either. They have been under scrutiny ever since Tiffany retired after the stock market crash of 1929. "The exact nature of Arthur Nash's business relation to Tiffany remains problematic. That [one firm] was named the Stourbridge Glass Company in deference to Arthur Nash's previous work in England suggests Nash's eminence and influence." It would appear that contracts negotiated between Tiffany and Nash's Stourbridge Glass Co. limited Nash's artistic control, and that, "there was a phrase that gave Louis C. Tiffany artistic control. Until then, Louis Tiffany's name had not appeared on the company's documents, but suddenly he was listed as president." On January 6, 1920, the firm was incorporated as the
Louis C. Tiffany Furnaces, Inc. At this time, Tiffany was still president, but most of his shares had been already transferred to the charitable foundations for artists that he had legally set up in his name. After this, the Nash family — Arthur J., and his two sons, A. Douglas and Leslie — owned a large block of the company. The closing of the factory has also been a matter of some debate. Overall, findings would suggest that the factory closed circa 1929–1930. Louis Tiffany subsequently died in 1933. == Tiffany & Co. ==