Corning Museum of Glass To Exhibit Tiffany’s Blown Favrile Glass

The innovations and artistry of Louis Comfort Tiffany will be explored in an exhibition of his blown glass works opening at The Corning Museum of Glass on November 1, 2009 and running through October 31, 2010. Tiffany Treasures: Favrile Glass from Special Collections will showcase nearly 60 hand-wrought pieces designed by Tiffany during one of his most fertile periods of artistic ingenuity, and made at his glasshouse in Corona, NY, between 1895 and 1920.

The decorative vases and functional vessels on view, including floral vases and cameo and Cypriot works, were made with Tiffany’s signature Favrile glass, distinguished by its deeply toned, rich colors and often brilliant, iridescent finish. Trademarked in 1894, Favrile glass quickly became fashionable and inspired many other designers.

The pieces in Tiffany Treasures are drawn primarily from the A. Douglas Nash and Edythe de Lorenzi Collections at Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and from the rarely seen Frank and Mary Elizabeth Reifschlager collection of Tiffany glass donated by the couple to the Rockwell Museum in Corning, NY, in the early 1990s.

“This assemblage of beautiful blown glass objects reflects Tiffany’s bold departure from the often fussy, predominantly Victorian style of the times in favor of more natural, sophisticated, and modern forms,” says Jane Shadel Spillman, curator of American glass. “He created some of his finest work in the first quarter century of production, between 1893 and 1918.”

Tiffany Treasures also includes a stunning, highly unusual Tiffany Peacock blown-glass lamp. The lamp was donated to the Corning Museum fully shattered, but has now returned to its full glory after a painstaking three-month restoration process by Museum conservators.

Full details of the exhibition are available here.

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